As technology evolves and improves at a rapid pace, we are bound to get better smartphones with increased battery power, all thanks to a recent breakthrough of a rechargeable battery with twice the energy capacity than your regular lithium ion batteries.
And the good news is that these batteries could become part of your devices as early as next year.
Called the lithium metal battery, the innovation comes from SolidEnergy, a company started by the US based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it can offer double the capacity of a lithium-ion battery, which is the standard used to power many smartphones at the moment, reported MIT News.
“With two-times the energy density, we can make a battery half the size, but that still lasts the same amount of time, as a lithium ion battery. Or we can make a battery the same size as a lithium ion battery, but now it will last twice as long,” stated Qichao Hu, co-inventer, CEO of SolidEnergy.
Now, coming to how does it work? In one regular lithium-ion batteries, ions move from a negatively charged graphite cathode to a positively charged anode through an electrolyte solution.
However, in the lithium metal battery the graphite is replaced with a lithium-metal foil, which has a far greater capacity for ions. However, the problem is that lithium-metal has a tendency to react violently with electrolyte solutions, unlike Graphite that is stable.
The problem is solved by creating a new kind of electrolyte solution that doesn’t overreact to lithium-metal, allowing batteries to be made half the size of modern batteries and still retain their full capacity or vice versa.
The company plans to make its batteries available to smartphone manufacturers next year, while the batteries would also be made available to makers of electric cars by 2018.
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