Innovative Battery Charges Phones in Seconds and Lasts for a Week

Scientists with the University of Central Florida might've saved us from future frustrations with dying smartphones.

[Image courtesy of University of Central Florida]

The team developed a new type of battery that lasts for days after being charged a few seconds. The battery uses supercapacitors to store more energy and be recharged more than 30,000 times without degrading that charge.

Everyone who's owned a smartphone longer than a year knows that it slowly starts to lose charge as the battery starts to degrade. But this novel innovation could prevent degradation all together.

“If they were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn’t need to charge it again for over a week,” said Nitin Choudhary, a postdoc associate who conducted much of the research.

Researchers have been studying nanomaterials in energy storage for years, but have always come up short. Supercapacitors to hold as much energy as a lithium-ion battery would have to be much larger. The team experimented using new 2D materials and put them on to the supercapacitors.

“There have been problems in the way people incorporate these two-dimensional materials into the existing systems – that’s been a bottleneck in the field. We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials,” said principal investigator Yeonwoong “Eric” Jung, a NanoScience assistant professor.

The team developed supercapacitors with millions of wires only nanometers thick coated with these 2D materials.

“For small electronic devices, our materials are surpassing the conventional ones worldwide in terms of energy density, power density and cyclic stability,” Choudhary said.

The UCF team isn't the only one to be researching the merits of better phone batteries. There have been developments into tinier lithium metal batteries that hold twice as many ions as normal. Another study developed a nanowire battery to withstand hundreds of thousands of charges.

The standard phone battery, lithium-ion batteries, are on their way out. These types of batteries have been linked to overheating. Most recently, it happened with Samsung Galaxy Note 7 devices overheating, smoking and (in some cases) exploding.

While this idea seems perfect for lanyone with a smartphone, Jung said they still have to work out the kinks.

“It’s not ready for commercialization,” Jung said. “But this is a proof-of-concept demonstration, and our studies show there are very high impacts for many technologies.”

Via UCF News

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