New Type of Battery - 40 hours in a laptop!

This development was discussed at the EAA-Silicon Valley meeting yesterday. The information discussed is important because the meeting is held in Palo Alto, the home town of Stanford University, and one of the attendees knows the researchers in question, and was able to explain the details to this announcement. But it's being passed through the imperfect memory filter I posess.

Crusher went to the front to start to read off this announcement, and this guy started jumping up and down excitedly saying he knew about it. So, Crusher maybe you can add to what I'm about to say.

The guy explained that the breakthrough is only for 1/3 of what makes up a lithium-ion battery. This is just the anode, not all the pieces which would go into making a usable battery from this breakthrough. The estimate was 3-5 yrs before it becomes a usable battery. The breakthrough had to do with the silicon nanowires (or nanotubes) are able to absorb more lithium than other materials, and it is able to absorb the lithium without swelling.

Yeah, I saw this news item somewhere, I thought David had posted it. David covered it pretty well above. I printed out a couple of different versions from the web and took them to the EAA meeting to see if anybody might be able to contact the Stanford researcher, Yi Cui, to see if he could speak at a future meeting. By golly I got a hit! One of the members knows the guy and recently spoke to him about the research. It's a great breakthrough, but it's just research so far. The consensus at the meeting was that in 3-5 years this could increase Lithium battery capacity by a good bit, but not by ten fold, not without work on the cathode and separator materials as well as the anode. Good stuff, though, points to better and better Lithium batteries in the near future!