How would you like to fully charge your smartphone battery in one minute? That would be pretty cool, and it would allow smartphone manufacturers to avoid using smaller capacity batteries inside phones. This would leave more room inside these devices to add the components needed to improve computing and data transfer capabilities. According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), an advanced technology invented at the University of Colorado could allow phones to charge up to 100% in just 60 seconds.
The new technology is based on the movement of ions through supercapacitors. Ion – is an atom that has a net positive charge, and a supercapacitor is used to store energy during charge and discharge cycles with high current and short duration. In a press release (via BGR ), researcher Ankur Gupta found that by making the ions move more efficiently, charging and releasing energy would happen faster, allowing the cell inside your phone to go from 0% to 100% in one minute or less.
Gupta notes that while some of these techniques have been used to study flow in porous materials such as oil reservoirs and water filtration, they have not been fully explored for energy storage systems. “Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my knowledge of chemical engineering to improve energy storage devices, – says Gupta. “It seemed to me that this topic was somewhat under-explored, so this was the perfect opportunity.
Gupta adds: “The main attraction of supercapacitors is their speed. So how can we speed up their charging and energy release? Due to the more efficient movement of ions”. One of the most important discoveries of the researchers showed that ions move differently than electrons at the intersections of tiny nano-sized pores. The study also showed that the movement of the ions was different from what was expected from Kirchhoff's law. The latter has been used to determine current strength in electric circuits since 1845.
Thanks to this research, the movement of ions in a complex network of thousands of interconnected pores can be modeled and predicted in just a few minutes. Gupta says: “This is a breakthrough in our work. We have found the missing link.
There is no telling how long it will take for this research in the lab to translate into technology that can be found in your phone. But the idea of being able to instantly charge a phone's battery should help move research forward.