Researchers Created Smartphone Battery That Charges In Only One Minute
Stanford University student Ming Gong has revealed an Aluminium Battery which only requires one minute to charge.
Last year, we reported Worldwide shipments of smartphones are expected to reach 234.5 million units in 2015, a modest year-over-year increase of 2.1% from the number of phones shipped in 2014.
As smartphones becomes the essential must have item, the demand for longer-lasting batteries will continue to increase. Now researchers at Stanford University are building an aluminum-ion battery prototype that speeds up the charging times. Scientists have built a flexible aluminium battery which they say could be a cheap, fast-charging and safe alternative to current designs.
Stamford Image
The protoype consists of a soft pouch, containing aluminium for one electrode and a graphite foam for the other - all surrounded by a special liquid salt.
It can recharge in less than a minute and is very safe and durable compared to lithium-ion batteries, but currently only delivers about half the voltage. The research papers s say it has advantages over lithium-ion batteries, common in electronic devices like smartphones, as well as traditional alkaline batteries.
"We have developed a rechargeable aluminium battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames," said senior author Prof Hongjie Dai from Stanford University in California.
Lithium-ion batteries are also a potentially a fire hazard, with many world-wide Airlines, issuing special instructions for shipping bulk lithium-battery shipments on passenger planes. The new Aluminium pouch was tested to destruction, it was deemed much safer and even worked for a while when attacked with a drill lasting longer without catching fire — which makes it much safer than lithium-ion batteries. There are also claims that this aluminum-ion prototype at Stanford takes only one minute to charge verses a Lithium-ion battery which can take many hours to charge.
Because it is lightweight and inexpensive, aluminium has attracted interest from battery engineers for many years, but it has never yielded a viable product.
Will this accelerate the development of the electric car cells ?
We do not know but are excited about the opportunities for resellers and dealers. The key to the new discovery was the choice of material for the other, positive electrode (the cathode) to go with aluminium for the negative electrode (or anode). Graphite - a form of carbon in which the atoms form thin, flat sheets - turned out to deliver very good performance, while also being similarly lightweight, cheap and widely available.
