A team of Canadian researchers have identified a new way to prolong the battery life of most laptops and cellphones after discovering a power-drainage flaw last year.
Researchers at Dalhousie University discover polypropylene tape is more stable than the current standard
Cassidy Chisholm · CBC News
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A team of Canadian researchers have identified a new way to prolong the battery life of most laptops and cellphones after discovering a power-drainage flaw last year.
The solution? A different kind of tape.
Typical laptop and phone batteries use tiny pieces of tape made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a synthetic resin, to hold its components together.
The team at Dalhousie University’s battery lab in Halifax determined in November of last year that this type of plastic can dissolve due to a chemical reaction in the battery, causing its charge to deplete without sending out electrical current — a process called self-discharge.
This is why devices that are fully charged can slowly lose their charge even while they’re turned off.
“Nobody, I think, thought that it could be the tape,” Anu Adamson, a PhD student who helped lead the research, told CBC Radio’s Mainstreet Halifax.
“Because to a degree, self-discharge is seen as something inevitable, really … like we can’t make totally perfect batteries. Most people thought that if there is a fix, then it can’t be that simple, but it just turns out that it actually can.”
Adamson said the team determined that using chemically stable polypropylene (PP) tape instead can increa
