There are many hoverboard fans who had their hearts broken during the holidays when orders were cancelled due to a federal safety alert and airline ban. This is partly blamed on the lithium battery technology, which makes the device a fire hazard. This problem has been solved by Stanford researchers who recently developed a lithium battery that can automatically shut down before overheating and turns itself on once the temperature cools, according to CBS News.
"People have tried different strategies to solve the problem of accidental fires in lithium-ion batteries," Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, said in an official statement. "We've designed the first battery that can be shut down and revived over repeated heating and cooling cycles without compromising performance."
Conventional batteries involve two electrodes within a charged gel or liquid electrolyte. These can generate heat if there is an immense concentration of electrical charge or if the battery is punctured, resulting in fire or explosion. The new lithium battery technology is based on what the researchers call fast and reversible thermoresponsive polymer switching material, which is made up of graphene-coated nickel nanoparticles that serves as the polymer battery composite, the researchers explained in a paper published in Nature. The new battery proceeds to a thermal expansion when it overheats, which turns the polyethylene film attached to the battery electrode non-conductive.
