Silicon Nanowires could offer a 10x improvement in battery life

Researchers at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University have successfully incorporated silicon nanowires into lithium ion batteries effectively offering a tenfold increase in the amount of charge they can store. Lithium-ion batteries currently use graphite as the anode, silicon however has a significantly greater charge capacity than graphite. According to Professor Yu Cui who led the research silicon “has the highest known theoretical charge capacity” and “is more than ten times higher than existing graphite anodes.” A performance increase of this magnitude would be incredible to say the least. Laptop batteries could potentially last 40+ hours instead of just 4 hours. For an electric car that uses lithium-ion batteries like the Tesla Roadster, the range could potentially be increased from 200 or so miles to over 2000 miles on a single charge! You can read more about this here:

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html

Or if you’re feeling really ambitious you can try reading the Journal article published in Nature and Nanotechnology here:

High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires