Friday, June 13, 2014: Honestly, smartphone battery life remains to single handedly frustrate even the best amongst us. To counter the same, researchers at the University Of California, Riverside Bourns College Of Engineering simply replaced standard graphite based anodes in Li-Ion batteries with Silicon, and the results were, well, simply outstanding! Li-Ion batteries so obtained can charge a device, more preferably your power hungry smartphone in just 10 minutes.
Traditional Lithium-Ion batteries (containing graphite as node) have several shortcomings: not only do they add to the overall weight of your device but also occupy considerable size within it. Researchers Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan observed that Silicon with its 10x bigger charge capacity compared to regular graphite based anodes allowed 63 per cent increase in the total cell capacity and make the battery about 40 per cent lighter at the same time. Based on their observations, they have built prototype batteries (using Silicon as anode) that could be charged 16x faster compared to standard Li-Ion batteries.
Earlier, an Israeli startup called StoreDot came out with a prototype charger that can replenish your smartphone battery in half a minute. StoreDot recently demonstrated their prototype charger at Microsoft’s Think Next Conference successfully charging a Samsung Galaxy S4’s battery (2600 mAh) in under half a minute. The catch is the charger only works with the Galaxy S4 for now, however, the company is working to get their charger work with all handsets.
