Charge your smartphone in just one minute

We all are slaves of our smart devices especially smartphones and one thing which matters more than anything to us is how long they will last, till the next time we plug them. We carry chargers, power banks and even spend on spare battery units to suffice our multimedia and online requirements from these technology marvels.

Smartphone manufacturers are increasing battery sizes and have even introduced fast chargers to cut the recharging duration. But nothing concrete has come up and we still end up with dead screens in less than a day’s usage.

But now, in an attempt to give a certain relief from this grave issue, a team of scientists led by Meng-Chang Lin and Hongjie Dai at Stanford University have come up with an ultra-fast-charging aluminum battery that could be utilized on a mass level for the smartphones and tablets.

The team has managed to achieve some unbelievable results, such as cutting the recharging time to just one minute. Yes, you read it right. The new battery can be recharged in just 60 seconds. Moreover the new technology is environment friendly, does not catch fire and even extends the overall life cycle of the battery units from the regular 1,000 cycles to up-to 7,500 cycles.

Talking about the technical aspects, the team has managed to develop a rechargeable aluminum battery, which can replace the existing technology consisting of lithium-ion and alkaline solutions. The new aluminum-ion system takes a negatively charged anode and a positively charged graphite cathode inside a flexible polymer-coated pouch with an ionic liquid electrolyte.

Dai also mentioned that in addition to smartphones, tablets and laptops, the new technology could be used to store energy from wind farms and solar panels on a grid which is practically very tough with a lithium-ion battery system.

However there is one problem with the new technology. The ‘Aluminum’ is too difficult to incorporate in the system and the solution is to develop the right materials that could repeatedly produce sufficient voltage after multiple cycles of charging and discharging. The team is working to fix the problem.