A Cheap Piece of Tape Increases Phone, Laptop Battery Life by 10%
A team of researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada discovered a simple and cheap way to extend battery life in smartphone and laptop batteries.
As CBC reports, a research team led by PhD student Anu Adamson found that the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) tape typically used to hold lithium-ion battery components together is prone to dissolving. This happens due to a chemical reaction in the battery and leads to a battery self-discharging over time.
If you've ever charged a battery and left it sitting idle only to come back a few days later to find some of the charge has depleted, you know how frustrating it can be. However, there's an easy fix.
Rather than using PET tape, Adamson determined that switching to using polypropylene (PP) tape in these batteries fixed the dissolving problem. The good news is, PP tape costs about the same as PET tape so there's no additional costs involved for manufacturing.
As for the benefits, the research team found that battery life in PP tape batteries is extended by up to 10 percent, while self-discharge decreases by up to 70 percent. In other words, it's a no-brainer for manufacturers to make the switch to PP tape on their production lines.
Jeff Dahn, a professor emeritus in the Dalhousie University's departments of physics, atmospheric science and chemistry, commented on the research, "This is really incredibly nice chemical detective work ... And it takes a very talented student to do this type of thing — to recognize all the connections between the various things that are going on in a lithium-ion battery and come up with this idea, is incredibly impressive."
Adamson's research paper, "Improving lithium-ion cells by replacing polyethylene terephthalate jellyroll
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