Mya Le Thai, a Vietnamese-American Ph.D. and research group leader at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), has collaborated with her colleagues to invent a battery that can be charged up to 200,000 times, significantly extending the battery’s “lifespan” to an astonishing 400 years.
Renowned for a Groundbreaking Invention
Dr. Mya Le Thai. (Photo: Priscilla Iezzi).
In 2016, Dr. Mya Le Thai gained international recognition for her invention of a battery capable of being charged up to 200,000 times. After conducting experiments over three months, Mya Le Thai, the head of the research team, accidentally developed a nanobattery by coating a collection of gold nanowires in manganese dioxide. She then encapsulated everything in an electrolyte made from a gel-like substance similar to Plexiglas.
Typically, nanowires will break after a maximum of about 8,000 charge/discharge cycles. However, tests showed that the battery lasted significantly longer and remained nearly intact after numerous charge/discharge cycles. This indicates that the nanowires inside became substantially more durable.
In the market, a laptop battery is usually rated for only a few hundred charge/discharge cycles. If the battery developed by Dr. Mya Le Thai’s team were used, the lifespan of a laptop battery could extend up to 400 years.
Dr. Mya Le Thai’s invention has received high praise from experts. Notably, the chair of the chemistry department at UCI, Reginald Penner, stated that the very thin layer of gel used by the Vietnamese-American scientist is the primary reason that the battery can be charged and discharged hundreds of thousands of times without losing its capacity. This is an impressive figure, considering that current batteries only achieve about 5,000 to 7,000 charge/discharge cycles.
The battery invented by Dr. Mya Le Thai could be widely applicable in cars, homes, airplanes, construction tools, space exploration, and various electronic devices and appliances.
Remarkable Achievements
Photo: UCI News.
Dr. Mya Le Thai, known in Vietnamese as Lê Thị Trà My, attended the prestigious Lê Quý Đôn High School in Da Nang during the 2002-2003 academic year before studying abroad in the United States.
Later, Mya Le Thai pursued her bachelor’s degree in Nanotechnology at UCLA. By 2015, she moved to Washington D.C. and worked at the Department of Energy’s Advanced Energy Research Center.
Subsequently, Mya Le Thai returned to UCI to engage in in-depth research in nanotechnology. She was a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Physical Chemistry at the University of California. In June 2016, Mya Le Thai earned her Ph.D. and then worked as an engineer for Intel Corporation in the United States.
