Lithium-Ion Battery Charges Smartphone in Seconds 

Lithium-ion batteries seem to be used in nearly every electronic device today – including our smartphones, laptops, and even electric cars and the Boeing Dreamliner. Now, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new lithium-ion battery that may not be a step in the technology's evolution, but a leap.

The new battery is 2,000 times more powerful than its current equivalents, and is said to deliver significant power as well as efficiency.

Contemporary batteries are built to deliver either power (watts) or energy (watt-hours), but not usually both. On one extreme of this balance of power are supercapacitors, which can release massive power, but only briefly; on the other you have fuel cells, which can store vast amounts of energy, but deliver little power.

The problem is that most modern devices require both and current batteries just can't deliver. The University of Illinois' battery, on the other hand, packs the power of a supercapacitor along with comparable energy storage to nickel-zinc and lithium-ion batteries.

What does this mean for the average mobile device user? According to the university's press release, wireless devices could transmit signals 30 times farther, or could sport a battery that's 30 times smaller. On top of that, the battery could be charged 1,000 times faster than existing lithium-ion batteries.

The breakthrough comes from a change to the traditional two-dimensional cathode and anode structure to a porous, three-dimensional structure. This allows porous electrodes to have much greater surface area, which means more chemical reactions can happen inside a given space, and thus faster power output and charging.

“This is a whole new way to think about batteries,” said lead researcher William P. King. “A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it.”

Full story at ExtremeTech