How would you like to fully charge your smartphone battery in one minute? That would be pretty cool and it could allow smartphone manufacturers to get away with using lower-capacity batteries inside phones. Doing this would leave more room inside these devices to add the components required for enhanced computing and data capabilities. According to a new study found in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a cutting-edge technique discovered by the University of Colorado could allow phones to charge to 100% in as little as 60 seconds.
The new technique is based on the movement of ions through supercapacitors. An ion is an atom that has a net positive charge and a supercapacitor is used to store energy during high current, short duration charge and discharge cycles. In a press release (via BGR), researcher Ankur Gupta discovered that by making the ions move more efficiently, the charging nd releas e of energy would be 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 the flow in porous materials such as oil reservoirs and water filtration, they have not been fully studied for energy storage systems. “Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my chemical engineering knowledge to advancing energy storage devices,” Gupta said. “It felt like the topic was somewhat underexplored and as such, the perfect opportunity.”
