Super-charging: Breakthrough in battery technology could fully charge a cellphone in minutes

www.dailymail.co.uk...

Mobile phones that can be charged in minutes could soon be possible thanks to a radical new battery technology.

Called supercapacitors, the material, in the form of a wafer, can turn phone casings, car chassis and even walls into quick charging batteries.

The new device that Pint and Westover has developed is a supercapacitor that stores electricity by assembling electrically charged ions on the surface of a porous material, instead of storing it in chemical reactions the way batteries do.

As a result, supercaps can charge and discharge in minutes, instead of hours, and operate for millions of cycles, instead of thousands of cycles like batteries.

Supercapacitors store ten times less energy than current lithium-ion batteries, but they can last a thousand times longer - meaning they can be built into walls and chassis.

The engineers suspended a heavy laptop from the supercapacitor to demonstrate its strength

Finally....a superbattery that will help reduce waste from the traditional cell battery! My phone lasts almost a full day but the apps are so draining on the battery....I think this will make it less stressful for mobile users finding the nearest socket to charge their phone!

But I do wonder what the limits of this battery charging are. Great start and looking forward to its integration in mainstream electronics!

a reply to: Skywatcher2011

Wasn't this already discovered by a 18-year old girl about a year ago?

Teen Invents Supercharger Ten Times More Powerful Than Conventional Batteries, Captures Google Attention

How come she isn't mentioned in the article?

Vanderbilt is taking all the credit!

originally posted by: Skywatcher2011
Finally....a superbattery that will help reduce waste from the traditional cell battery! My phone lasts almost a full day but the apps are so draining on the battery....I think this will make it less stressful for mobile users finding the nearest socket to charge their phone!

But I do wonder what the limits of this battery charging are. Great start and looking forward to its integration in mainstream electronics!

and who will be the company that will buy the patent for this?.....because i'll throw some money into that stock, for sure....

Batteries are the one thing that has not kept pace with technology.

Our car battery looked the same as it did 50 years ago.

This is a welcome breakthrough.

originally posted by: whyamIhere
Batteries are the one thing that has not kept pace with technology.

Our car battery looked the same as it did 50 years ago.

This is a welcome breakthrough.

There is a reason for that. The technology exists to make light bulbs that will outlast a human life, yet we constantly have to replace them in our homes. That's because industry intentionally creates products to fail so that you have to shell out more money to replace them. There's no big money in truly sustainable products and energy. If this battery is as remarkable as it would seem, I'm sure they will find a way to either make it disappear quietly or build it with inherent flaws so that it will break down over the course of a year or two.

originally posted by: swanne
a reply to: Skywatcher2011

Wasn't this already discovered by a 18-year old girl about a year ago?

Supercapacitors were developed like 30 years ago. You probably have one in your computer. The goal is to increase their capacity which sadly doesn't compare to current battery technology.

a reply to: Skywatcher2011

Ok first of all "supercapacitors" have been around for decades, secondly, this looks exactly the same as a discovery made by US scientists in 2012, called the "super supercapacitor".