Say Goodbye To Slow Battery Charging.....

By: Prayag nao

Emerging technology promises that we might soon be able to power our phones in 10 minutes instead of a few hours. Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have come up with a new architecture for lithium-batteries that could make speedy charges for portable electronics a reality. You can find lithium-ion batteries in everything from your smartphone to your laptop to electric vehicles, and it comes down to how they’re built.

 


The researchers say current lithium-ion batteries are limited. In electric cars, batteries are a huge part of the vehicle’s mass. “And the size of batteries in portable electronics limits the trend of downsizing,” they added. So the idea is to make them smaller and lighter while amping up their abilities.

The UC Riverside scientists want to replace graphite anodes with silicon anodes in lithium-ion batteries. (Anodes are a key part of how batteries work.) What that means in less-scientific jargon is that silicon would improve a battery’s total charge capacity. According to the university, the researchers’ approach is designed to deliver a battery that is 40 percent lighter and smaller with potentially 63 percent more total cell capacity.

Wei Wang,told OZY that they’ve used this new technology to demo charging portable electronics in 10 minutes. And they’re currently working with industrial partners to commercialize the technology. But while Wang says silicon tech is “very promising,” he notes it still has issues and must be engineered to work better. It’s also too early to know if it would produce batteries that are cheaper or more expensive, but according to Wang: “It is definitely scalable.”

And if you’re thinking that a 10-minute charge is impressive, consider this: Earlier this year, an Israeli company claimed to have prototyped technology that could charge a cell phone battery in 30 seconds. Imagine that in the time it takes you to start scrolling through your Twitter feed, your battery would be charged. And last year, an 18-year-old student developed a supercapacitor (an energy storage device) that could charge a phone battery in 20 to 30 seconds. A Japanese company recently announced that it had created a “dual carbon” battery that can be charged 20 times faster than regular lithium-ion cells. And there’s buzz about incorporating a material called graphene so batteries could reportedly be submerged in water.