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April 18, 2013

Powerful New Microbatteries May Give a Charge to Marketplace

By Ed Silverstein, TMCnet Contributor

New microbatteries have been developed by researchers at the University of Illinois that are super-powerful and have widespread potential applications in consumer products.

They are so powerful in fact that the research team is convinced that a cell phone powered by these lithium ion batteries could jump-start a dead car battery – and then recharge the phone quickly. It is believed they are the most powerful batteries of their type, ever, estimated to be 2,000 times more powerful than similar options. Also, they provide more power than any supercapacitors. Yet, they are only a few millimeters.



It is also predicted that they could offer widespread applications in radio communications and compact electronics.

“This is a whole new way to think about batteries,” Lead Researcher Professor William P. King said in a university statement. “A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it.”

The researchers were able to reduce the flowing distance of the ions and electrons to get energy out quicker. They provide both energy and power while usually, batteries only offer one or the other.

James Pikul, a graduate student who worked on the project, said that in the past, “If you want high energy you can’t get high power; if you want high power it’s very difficult to get high energy. But for very interesting applications, especially modern applications, you really need both. That’s what our batteries are starting to do. We’re really pushing into an area in the energy storage design space that is not currently available with technologies today.”

Looking ahead to commercial applications, the microbatteries can charge 1,000 times faster than current options. A thin phone could be charged in less than a second.

Sectors which could benefit from the new batteries include: consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers and sensors.

“Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery – until now,” King added in a statement carried by TMCnet. “Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it’s connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny.”

Also, King predicts the technology could be available for consumers in "perhaps one to two years," according to a report from Mashable. "The first applications of this technology will be to be replace supercapacitors in radios and personal electronics."

However, other battery experts warned the technology may be challenging to offer commercially.

Oxford Professor Peter Edwards told the BBC, "This is a very exciting development which demonstrates that high power densities are achievable by such innovations.” But there are “challenges” such as: “scaling this up to manufacturing levels; developing a simpler fabrication route; and addressing safety issues,” he said.

"I'd want to know if these microbatteries would be more prone to the self-combustion issues that plagued lithium-cobalt oxide batteries which we've seen become an issue of concern with Boeing's (News - Alert) Dreamliner jets," he added.

The current electrolyte used in the battery is a combustible liquid, the BBC reported. However, King will switch to using “a safer polymer-based electrolyte to address the issue,” the BBC said.

“Our key insight is that the battery microarchitecture can concurrently optimize ion and electron transport for high-power delivery, realized here as a three-dimensional bicontinuous interdigitated microelectrodes,” the researchers wrote in a recent article in Nature. “The battery microarchitecture affords trade-offs between power and energy density that result in a high-performance power source, and which is scalable to larger areas.”




Edited by Jamie Epstein
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