New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds
New breakthrough may let us charge smartphones in 60 seconds
A breakthrough could let us build next-gen chargers capable of charging our electronics in just 60 seconds.
What if charging your phone took less time than brushing your teeth? A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could very well hold the key to a next-gen charger capable of recharging your phone in just 60 seconds.
Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered a new cutting-edge technique that could make it possible to charge devices almost instantaneously. This would make charging phones, laptops, and even electric cars much more efficient and convenient. The foundation of the new technique is based on new insights into how ions move through supercapacitors.
The key, one of the researchers explains in a press release, is to make the movement of the ions more efficient. By doing this we can make the charging and release of energy much faster, allowing for that next-gen charger that is capable of boosting your phone’s charge from 0 to 100 in just a minute, or maybe even less.
To make this discovery, the researchers looked at the movement of ions through a complex network of interconnected pores running through the supercapacitor. Their findings have helped modify a scientific law that researchers have used to govern electrical currents for more than 175 years. This law, called the Kirchhoff circuit law, describes the flow of electrons in a simple loop of wiring in most classes.
However, when inspecting the ions and their movement, the researchers found that the ions move fundamentally differently at the intersections of tiny nanoscale pores when compared to how electrons move near the same locations. Further observations helped them determine that these movements are different from what Kirchhoff’s law describes. This doesn’t completely throw out the old laws, though, as they still provide valid explanations for how electronics flow within conventional electronic circuits.
However, to create a next-gen charger capable of taking full advantage of the movements of the ions, we have to look at things different. This, the researchers say, is “the missing link” that they have been looking for. Creating more efficient energy storage has been a long-term goal for many engineers.
We’ve seen water-based batteries capable of storing more than traditional lithium-ion batteries. Still, a method that lets us charge our batteries almost instantly would remove a lot of the hindrances surrounding the wider adoption of things like electric cars. Not to mention how much more convenient a next-gen character would make charging laptops, phones, and other electronic devices.
Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.
Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don't get me wrong, but they're not batteries.
Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.
The bigger issue I would see is the heat created from dumping all that energy in at once. And can a US outlet even provide that much power?
Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.
Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.
The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.
Could you have a bunch of them and draw from them in sequence?
Increasing capacitance (how much charge is stored to reach a certain voltage) or the voltage it is charged to would indeed increase the capacity. Putting several in parallel would work, as would making a bigger capacitor. The main problem as far as I can tell is that the energy density of even supercapacitors is low, so you'd need a much larger volume to have the same capacity (and thus a much thicker phone).
This sounds at least 10 years from an actual product.
!remindme 10 years
Stories like this have been posted every so often to reddit. I'll believe this is possible when I see it available in consumer electronics (and not just lab conditions).
One hour is fast enough
Can we focus on other things, like making devices cheaper or idk, NOT spy bricks
How about we make phones repairable. Like maybe removable batteries like in the fairphone.
How about both?
posted from my iPhone
I remember when you could fully charge your battery in under 30 seconds.
REMOVABLE BATTERIES BITCH
Well, that's not really charging, now is it?
How about two batteries that can be ejected and swapped without powering off the device? We don't need to wait for super-capacitors today.
iPhones... someday. :)
...and explode them in the next 60
Consider that the energy output of a 12-gauge shotgun is approximately 4500 Newton-meters and, from personal experience, can rotate a first-gen iPad at an extrapolated 240 rpm (extrapolated as this proved difficult to sustain). That gives us an equivalent of 113 kW! A modern ipad would only need about 13 kW to charge in one second.
So, one shotgun shell could easily charge yours and 7 of your friends ipads instantaneously, although the results are difficult to appreciate.
No, most phones are allready safe to leave on your charger all night.
My worthless phone charges fast enough.
Can we please just have food, shelter, healthcare, peace, sustainabilty, etc?
Sure but I doubt these researchers are in a position to provide all that
No! Now take this slave labour cobalt and partake in the market place of ideas... I said partake! *shakes fist*
Figured I'd do the math on the power required.
In the article, they show a iPhone 15 Pro, which has a 3274 mAh battery, so let's go with that. Assuming a 3.7 V battery and a 1 minute charging time, that's
3274 mAh × 3.7 V / 1 min ≈ 727 W.They might just as well sell PC power supply to USB adapters then.
Call me skeptical I guess but if you wanted a phone that worked as long as lithium say 5000mah using capacitors I think it would be a dozen times larger at least.
Maybe I've got it wrong and supercapacitors hold more energy or something like that.
you are correct
supercapacitors
I can’t even imagine the heat generated from charging a battery in 60 seconds. Gonna get branded by my bezel
I look forward to charging my phone 60 seconds before leaving the house 👍
Just smart phones? Or can I charge my gameboy with this?
I like how they chose a phone wireless charging for their "super fast and efficient" charging article.
Never mind phones, what about cars?
So an electric car might hold 100 kWh. To charge that in 1 minute you would need 6000 kW of power, or 6 MW. Typical "rapid" chargers today do 350 kW and these are the kind that are difficult to find. A nuclear plant makes around 1,000 MW so if you had 166 cars charging at once you would overload one.
This does not sound sustainable at all.
So what are we looking at, the next 5 years?
No, never. Current charging rates already get close to thermal constraints. Hitting those charging rates either requires accepting much lower power density or using way more metal per cell. This research might inform design changes to improve charging rates, but we'll never see high capacity batteries charging in a minute.
The researchers know this and only mention wearables and iot devices applications. The article author erroneously makes the leap to high energy density devices.
If you don't care about energy density at all, ceramic capacitors can already charge and discharge in microseconds.
It sounds like this is completely clickbait article, bordering on misinformation.
Well this discovery is about super capacitors and not batteries.
I don't understand. Is this a new material, membrane, electrolyte, way to deliver electricity to the battery, or something else entirely? Will this require an internal change to future batteries or something external? Also, is this for Lithium-Ion batteries only or other batteries that use ions too? And finally, how does this impact lifetime of the battery? Fast charging already has impact on batteries for charging in 30 minutes to an hour. The effect of just 60 seconds (a 30 fold increase) could be substantial...
The original research was regarding supercapacitors, not Lithium-ion. Based on the PNAS preview it seems it has to do with changing the design of a supercapacitor to increase charge rate.
Who tf considers their teeth clean in 60 seconds?
Edit: "Less time than it takes to brush your teeth..." I should have some coffee.
Reminds me of The Office when Michael Scott implies he brushes his teeth faster than a guy in a wheel chair lol
Somehow there is a downside to this and whoever voiced it was shouted down