How often do we complain about our smartphones not able to hold on to its juice so as to let us exploit the full features of the phones. Our phones can play HD games, run upto full 1080p movies, stay connected to 3G/WiFi, run those fancy live wallpapers and what not! But we never have enough battery power to run it all in one go. Unless you own a premium Samsung Galaxy smartphone or an iDevice, those small little 1420-2000 mAh batteries always ridicule the potential of these smartphones. Not only mobile phones, the tablets, laptops or the digital camera. We do experience moments when the battery just dies out at the moment of need!
However, Chongwu Zhou, professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering has now come up with a solution to the miseries of all devices that run on Lithium Ion batteries. A lithium ion battery that promises to get charged in just 10 minutes and holds the charge capacity / capacitance of 3 times the current batteries.
Zhou worked with graduate students Mingyuan Ge, Jipeng Rong, Xin Fang and Anyi Zhang, as well as Yunhao Lu of Zhejiang University in China, according to a Southern California statement to work on these batteries which are being claimed as the next generation of batteries.
Till now the anode (part where current flows INTO battery) and the cathode (current flows OUT) of the battery were being made of single solid plate of silicon. As the current passed through these plates, after a period of time, these plates would break down, thus causing the poor battery life.
However, this team of brilliant researchers came up with a simplest solution that no one could come up with. The solution was, rather than making these Silicon plates as solids, they made it porous in nature. The tiny pores on the nano-wires allowed the silicon to expand and contract without breaking while simultaneously increasing the surface area – which in turn allows lithium-ions to diffuse in and out of the battery more quickly, improving performance. Or simply putting it as, when the charge is flowing, metal occupies the space of pores and when the flow has stopped, it contracts back thus no break down of the plates.
Even though the solution seemed so very simple, there was another aspect to look at. It is highly costly to produce the huge amount of these nano porous plates at a global level, looking at the number of devices that are running on these batteries. To solve this, Zhou’s team took commercially available nano-particles-tiny silicon spheres-and etched them with the same pores as the nano-wires. The particles function similarly and can be made in any quantity desired.
Zhou said
It’s an exciting research. It opens the door for the design of the next generation lithium-ion batteries
Let’s see when these batteries actually hit the markets and save us the troubles. You can read more about it here