New Battery Tech Allows You To Charge In Seconds And Lasts For Days

Super-capacitors could power your devices and vehicles!

If today’s devices have anything in common, it’s a weakness.

Each and every device we use today is limited in it’s potential and reliability, by the weakest link — it’s battery. Devices are hungry, batteries are finite in storage, finite in lifetime (called charge cycles) and often times, batteries are glacially slow to charge (remember the iPad 3, that took about 19 years to fully recharge?).

Knowing this, researchers, brands and accessory makers have been spending an inordinate amount of time and resources to get viable solutions; and many new materials (gold coated nanowires, silicon anode, wood), techniques (Hydrogen Fuel Cells, battery less power) and even some innovative fuel types (bio-organic peptides, urine, sugar) have been considered — to a fair degree of success… in the labs.

Here’s another group of people that has been working to solve many of the issues intrinsic to the very basis of fuel cells.

Scientists from the University of Central Florida (UCF) have created a super-capacitor battery prototype that works like new even after being recharged 30,000 times! Not only that, it recharges in lesser time than it takes for a leaf fall from the tree to Mother Earth!

This research could yield high-capacity, ultra-fast-charging batteries that last over 20 times longer than a conventional lithium-ion cell. “You could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn’t need to charge it again for over a week”, says UCF postdoctoral associate Nitin Choudhary.

So, how’s all this work? Magic!

Actually Physics, Chemistry and fourteen truckloads of intelligence.

Super-capacitors can be charged quickly because they store electricity statically on the surface of a material, rather than using chemical reactions like batteries. This requires “two-dimensional” material sheets with large surface areas that can hold lots of electrons and the research, including that by EV-maker Henrik Fisker and UCLA, uses graphene as the two-dimensional material.

The high-powered battery is packed with super capacitors that can store a large amount of energy, looks like a thin piece of flexible metal that is about the size of a finger nail and could be used in phones, electric vehicles and wearables, according to the researchers.

In addition to storing energy rapidly, the small battery can be recharged more than 30,000 times. In context, normal lithium-ion batteries begin to tire within a few hundred charges and typically last between 300 to 500 full charges & drain cycles before dropping to 70% of their original capacity. It is uncommon for a lithium-ion battery to withstand more than 1,500 charges before it fails, the Florida researchers claimed and other estimates put the lifecycle of batteries currently on the market at a lenient maximum of 7,000 charges.

Yeonwoong “Eric” Jung from UCF shared that it is a challenge to integrate graphene with other materials used in super-capacitors. That’s why his team wrapped 2D metal materials (TMDs) just a few atoms thick around highly-conductive one-dimensional nano-wires, letting electrons pass quickly from the core to the shell. That yielded a fast charging material with high energy and power density that’s relatively simple to produce.

“We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials”, Jung says. Jung’s team has developed super-capacitors composed of millions of nanometer-thick wires coated with shells of two-dimensional materials where a highly conductive core facilitates fast electron transfer for fast charging and uniformly coated shells of two-dimensional materials yield high energy and power densities.

The research is in its nascent stage and not ready for commercial implementation yet but it looks promising. “For small electronic devices, our materials are surpassing the conventional ones worldwide in terms of energy density, power density and cyclic stability”, Choudhary said.

Jung calls the research “proof-of-concept,” and the team is now trying to patent its new process.

While it could go nowhere or take a fair degree of time to hit commercial standards, like many other battery developments, it’s worth looking at new super-capacitor research closely. If commercialized, it could allow for longer-range EVs that can be charged in minutes rather than hours resulting in long-lasting (non-explosive) smartphones that can be charged in seconds and simultaneously reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

Originally published at Chip-Monks.