New aluminium phone battery will charge in a minute, can be drilled and bent
New technology is also much safer than existing smartphone batteries
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.A new smartphone battery promises to make charging much quicker, less often and far safer.
The new technology uses aluminium and graphite, and has been developed by scientists at Stanford.
The battery is bendable, too — which the scientists say could eventually make way for phones that are also bendable.
Scientists across the world are working hard to overhaul the current battery technology, which uses lithium-ion chemicals but are only improving slowly and can be unsafe to make and use.
At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, one of the most celebrated technology reveals was a smartphone battery that could charge in two minutes. Dyson also invested in a battery technology that could eventually double the life of batteries, last month.
Aliminium batteries have long been hoped to overtake other technologies, since it is cheap and can store a lot of power, but scientists have struggled to get enough voltage out of such a battery. That problem is still to be fully overcome with the new battery, though it was shown off powering an HTC smartphone.
The Stanford scientist’s battery is not flammable, like existing lithium-ion technology. It can even be drilled through and still used for some time, meaning that it could withstand shock.
Existing batteries, which use chemicals to store power, also steadily lose capacity over time as their power storage decays. But the Stanford battery can last for thousands of cycles of charging and then use.
As well as meaning that phone batteries and other uses won’t see the gradual decline that competing technologies do, the lack of decay also means that the battery could be useful in high-use environments, like power grids that store electricity for cities and other large areas.
The new technology was demonstrated in a video posted yesterday by graduate student Ming Gong and postdoctoral scholar Yingpeng Wu.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments