Charging a Smartphone in Minutes

The current woe for all smartphone users is the need to constantly recharge the battery. While some progress has been made towards having batteries that can store energy for longer periods of time, it is still time consuming to recharge them. This is the reason why carrying battery banks along with the phone has become more of a necessity than a luxury.

Research students in the College of Engineering at Drexel University have come up with a science project which hopes to improve the manner in which batteries are charged. They managed to create a new electrode design from a highly conductive, two-dimensional material called MXene.

Professor Yury Gogotsi, who led the research team hopes that using the new electrode design will help make chemical charge storage, used in batteries and pseudocapacitors, as effective as physical storage used in electrical double-layer capacitors, also known as supercapacitors.

To support his hope the researchers managed to charge the thin MXene electrodes in tens of milliseconds. While there is much more work to be done in making an actual battery which can be charged in seconds, it is interesting to note that the commercial applications for such a product will be phenomenal.