Successful development of new materials helps to fully charge smartphones in seconds

Taking the time to stop working and plugging the power cord to charge your phone will soon be a thing of the past, as scientists are developing a new electrode design that will fully charge batteries in just a few. seconds instead of a few hours.

They announced that it could not only solve the phone charging problem, but also improve the disadvantage that is holding back the electric vehicle market.

Previous studies have had the idea of ​​using supercapacitors as an energy storage device for pocket electronic devices. These supercapacitors produce energy in large clusters, and they have a lot of potential in providing energy for future technology.

But their problem is that they can only be used in fast charge / discharge cycles instead of long-term energy storage.

Now, a team from Drexel University has combined the characteristics of a supercapacitor with traditional batteries with a large capacity by using a material called MXene .

Hopefully we will soon no longer have to wait time to charge the battery.

'This study completely rejects a very common misconception that chemical energy storage technology, often used in batteries, is always much slower than material storage technology. For use in two-layer capacitors, or alternatively supercapacitors, ' said lead researcher Yury Gogotsi from Drexel University's School of Engineering.

'Here we are able to sample a thin process of charging MXene electrodes in just a few tens of milliseconds thanks to its electrical conductivity. This will allow us to develop fast-charging devices, but at the same time be able to store more energy than conventional supercapacitors. "

MXene is a thin nano material that looks a lot like a sandwich: including " oxide " slices and "multiply" carbon and conductive metals. When they are produced, the MXene layers will be stacked like Pringles fries.

Despite being an excellent conductor of matter, the stacking structure (such as the supermarket Pringles potato box) also creates a barrier to prevent the diffusion of the ion chemical energy transducer. a battery.

In order for a battery to store electricity, ions will be retained in ports called 'redox reactive regions' . If there are more ports, the more energy the battery will hold, and the more important it is that the battery must allow the ion to move freely or else they will not be able to reach those ports.

In order to allow the ions in MXene to move freely, a structural change is required.

Scientists changed the structure of MXene by combining it with the hydrogel, turning the Pringle potato stack into a structure more similar to Swiss cheese, thereby allowing the ions to move freely.

'For traditional batteries and supercapacitors, the path to the energy storage ports of ions is very difficult,' said Maria Lukatskaya, a member of the research team.

'The ideal electrode structure will allow carriers to move to ports through multi-lane "highways", instead of single-lane roads. This multi-hole electrode design has achieved that goal, and allows for super-fast charging — in just a few seconds or even less.

It should be said that although this technology seems very potential, it is still unclear how the battery from this material can be scaled up for use in a large car. . However, it is certain that if this study is widely used on cars and phones, it will completely change the way we use batteries. "

"If we can start using ultra-thin conductive materials as the battery's electrode, we will be able to help batteries work much faster, much more than today ," Gogotsi said. ' Sooner or later, if we take advantage of this we will soon have phone batteries, laptops, and cars that are fully capable of charging at a much faster rate - just a few seconds, a few minutes and no more hours. "

This study was published in Nature Energy.

Experimental video with MXene material.