~ MamakTalk ~: This New Technology Could Charge Your Phone In Just Five Minutes

2021年6月29日星期二

This New Technology Could Charge Your Phone In Just Five Minutes

A team of researchers from the University of Cambridge has made a major advancement in battery charging technology. They have developed a new technology that could charge a battery from 0 to 100 percent in “as little as five minutes.”

Dr. Ashkay Rao from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory led this research. According to Rao, lithium-ion batteries (the type found in smartphones and tons of other electronics) have different speed limits depending on whether they are charging or discharging.

“When charging, the speed depends on how fast the lithium ions can pass through the particles of active material. When discharging, the speed depends on how fast the ions are inserted at the edges. If we can control these two mechanisms, it would enable lithium-ion batteries to charge much faster,” Rao said.

His research team has now developed a new technique to look for these mechanisms in lithium-ion batteries. The new “low-cost” technique allows researchers to look inside batteries in a completely new way. They can now identify the “speed limits” for charging cycles within batteries, something that was not possible before. The new optical microscopy technique lets researchers observe the phase transitions in the charge-discharge cycle. This would enable them to maximize the charging speed without affecting the battery health or causing overheating issues.

This new technology developed by the research team from the University of Cambridge is called interferometric scattering. It was published in the journal Nature last week, The Independent reports (via). The existing technologies to look inside batteries, such as synchrotron X-ray or electron microscopy, are reportedly expensive and time-consuming.

Researchers develop a new technology that can potentially charge a battery in just five minutes

We have seen a drastic rise in battery charging speeds on smartphones in recent years. Xiaomi last month showcased 200W charging that can replenish the power of a 4,000mAh lithium-ion battery in just eight minutes. However, these technologies come at a price. Faster charging also degrades the battery faster. Not to mention, a higher energy transfer speed can cause the battery to overheat or explode as well if not properly controlled.

The researchers from the University of Cambridge now aim to address these issues with their new technique. They expect it to significantly impact battery research in the coming years. “The fact that we can actually see these phase boundaries charging in real time was really surprising. This technique could be an important piece of the puzzle in the development of next-generation batteries,” said researcher Dr. Christoph Schnedermann from the Cavendish Laboratory.

It will be interesting to see what this research leads to. Of course, we won’t see batteries charging in just five minutes anytime soon. But this slow and steady progress will one day surely lead us to that possibility.

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