Nanotechnology could improve the life of the lithium batteries used in portable devices, including laptop computers, mp3 players, and mobile phones. Research to be published in the Inderscience publication International Journal of Nanomanufacturing demonstrates that carbon nanotubes can prevent such batteries from losing their charge capacity over time.
Researchers at the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, in China, have been investigating how to improve the kind of rechargeable batteries that are almost ubiquitous in today’s portable devices. Mobile phones, mp3 players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptop computers usually use lithium-ion batteries to give them portability. However, Li-ion dell inspiron 9300 battery suffer from degradation especially when they get too hot or too cold and eventually lose the capacity to be fully recharged. This means a loss of talk time for mobile phone users and often no chance to use a laptop for the whole of a long haul flight.
Shengyang’s Hui-Ming Cheng and colleagues have turned to carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to help them use silicon (Si) as the battery anode but avoid the problem of large volume change during alloying and de-alloying. Carbon nanotubes resemble rolled-up sheets of hexagonal chicken wire with a carbon atom at the crossover points of the wires and the wires themselves being the bonds between carbon atoms, and they can be up to a dell inspiron 9400 battery millimeter long but mere nanometers in diameter.
The researchers grew carbon nanotubes on the surface of tiny particles of silicon using a technique known as chemical vapor deposition in which a carbon-containing vapor decomposes and then condenses on the surface of the silicon particles forming the nanoscopic tubes. They then coated these particles with carbon released from sugar at a high temperature in a vacuum. A separate batch of silicon particles produced using sugar but without the CNTs was also prepared.
With the new Si-CNT anode material to hand, the team then investigated how well it functioned in a prototype Li-ion battery and compared the results with the material formed from sugar-coated silicon dell inspiron b120 battery particles.
They found that after twenty cycles of the semi-cell experiments, the sugar-coated Si-CNT composite material achieved a discharge capacity of 727 milliamp hours per gram. In contrast the charge dell inspiron e1505 battery,dell latitude x300 battery,dell xps m140 battery capacity of the simple sugar-coated particles had dropped to just 363 mAh per gram.
