December 24, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
Graphene Will Improve Smartphone
Batteries Life Ten Times
Improved battery life for smartphones –
the holy grail:
Now when you hear of people playing down theissue
of battery life, ask yourself this, would you rather
it improved or happy that it stayed the same?It has
been quite the challenge to ensure that our belo-
ved mobile devices can keep up with the amount of
power that we bestow in them, and where “moores”
law dictates that things can get smaller and smaller
and quicker and quicker, the law of the “li-ion” does
not follow suit, so having a laptop inside a thimble
with quad core processing makes for one particu-
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/graphene-will-improve-smartphone-batteries-life-ten-times/
larly pathetic thimble, apart from the five minutes
that it can open up iTunes in two seconds flat and
Have you heard of graphene? If not this little won- play Angry birds for mice in 3D. Yes, it looks pretty
der material could be the thing that helps your cool for a while, but alas they never last!
smartphone last longer than half a day in the not
so distant future. We examine how this material will You see there is only one answer to that, and where
help your mobile phones battery life be extended I can safely, and happily say that my smartphone
by up to ten times. screen should stay the same size, the battery life
does need improving.
Graphene the wonder material improves
battery life: Smartphone battery charge time
increased by a factor of ten?
We have talked about smartphone battery life issues
in various articles, ranging from one big moan to a Taking a look at a TechCrunch article from back
guide on getting the most from your devices puny in November that I totally missed, it would appear
little battery. that a professor at Northwestern university called
Harold Kung has devised an ingenious way of uti-
But now we are hearing that the wonderful material lising the wonder material that is graphene and
the we wrote about ages ago called Graphene could integrating it into the structure of li-ion batteries
end up being a smartphone battery saviour, as well in order to increase both the charge capacity and
as its material of choice in years to come. charge speed of this type of battery.
They key is in the way Graphene is layered in
between the lithium ions, as the ions move across
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December 24, 2011
batteryfast.co.uk
Graphene Will Improve Smartphone Batteries Life Ten Times
the layers of graphene, the speed in which this oc- Essentially, what is needed to increase the capacity
curs directly relates to the speed that it can charge. of li-ion batteries is to be able to insert small clusters
of silicon in between each graphene slice which al-
Helping to accelerate this process the professor de- lows more ions to collect and gather at the electrode
cided to poke millions of tiny holes into the graphene end, increasing capacity, the fact that graphene and
layers of around 10-20nm in size, this helped to pro- silicon are malleable helps this process work.
vide a “shortcut” for the ions to travel. Which in-turn
helped to charge the battery ten times quicker than “Now we almost have the best of both worlds,
normal cells would be able to achieve. we have much higher energy density because
of the silicon, and the sandwiching reduces the
Smartphone battery capacity extended: capacity loss caused by the silicon expanding
and contracting. Even if the silicon clusters
break up, the silicon won’t be lost.”
The downside is that the charge capacity and speed
of charge degrades sharply after 150 charges, but
as was pointed out, you are pretty much well into
your second year of use at that point as the charge
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/graphene-will-improve-smartphone-batteries-life-ten-times/
lasts so long anyway.
This is seriously great news for device manufac-
turers who right now need to work on ways to im-
prove their smartphone battery life until this kind
of technology becomes affordable, and practical and
is present in every single phone sold.
Related Articles:
So
not only has professor Harold Kung found a way to Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment
speed up the charge time for li-ion batteries, he then below and continue the conversation, or subscribe
went on to mess about with some more concepts to my feed and get articles like this delivered auto-
and test the results out. matically to your feed reader.
The second of which increased the overall capacity
of the battery by another factor of ten, meaning that
you could almost get a full week from one charge
if these were to be rolled out as production battery
sets.
And the key to this achievement was the fact that
graphene is so malleable, and so avoided negative
effects of the silicon expansion issues that beset
earlier attempts to achieve similar results.
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