Vietnamese female doctor breaks through with 400-year-old battery invention

Mya Le Thai - a Vietnamese-American female doctor and head of a research team at the University of California (UCI), Irvine, USA, and her colleagues have invented a battery with a charging cycle of up to 200,000 times, helping to extend the battery's "lifespan" up to 400 years .

Famous for groundbreaking inventions

Dr. Mya Le Thai. (Photo: Priscilla Iezzi).

In 2016, Vietnamese-American PhD Mya Le Thai, working at the University of California (UCI), Irvine, USA, became known to the world when she invented a battery with a charging cycle of up to 200,000 times . Specifically, after testing for about 3 months, Mya Le Thai - the head of the research team accidentally developed nanobattery after coating a set of gold nanofibers in manganese dioxide. Then, she wrapped the whole thing in an electrolyte made of a gel like Plexiglas.

Normally, nanofibers would break after about 8,000 maximum charge/discharge cycles. However, tests showed that the battery lasted longer and was almost intact after many charge/discharge cycles. This means that the nanofibers inside became many times more durable.

On the market, a laptop is only rated to reach a few hundred charge/discharge cycles. If the battery type developed by Dr. Mya Le Thai's team is used, the battery life of a laptop could last up to 400 years.

Dr. Mya Le Thai's invention is highly appreciated by experts. For example, the head of the chemistry department at UCI, Mr. Reginald Penner, said that the use of a very thin gel layer by the Vietnamese female doctor is the main reason for creating a battery that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times without losing capacity. This is an impressive number because current batteries only reach about 5,000 - 7,000 charge/discharge cycles.

The battery type invented by Dr. Mya Le Thai can be widely used in cars, houses, airplanes, construction tools, space exploration, devices, and household appliances.

Remarkable achievements

Photo: UCI News.

Dr. Mya Le Thai's Vietnamese name is Le Thi Tra My . Before going to the US to study, she attended Le Quy Don High School for the Gifted, Da Nang City, school year 2002 - 2003.

Later, Mya Le Thai studied for a bachelor's degree in nanotechnology at UCLA. In 2015, she went to Washington DC and worked at the Center for Advanced Energy Research under the US Department of Energy.

After that, Mya Le Thai returned to UCI to participate in in-depth research on nanotechnology. She is a doctoral student majoring in Chemical Physics at the University of California. In June 2016, Mya Le Thai received her doctorate and then worked as an engineer for the computer corporation Intel Corporation in the US.