Wednesday 16 November 2011

New Technology Will Boost Battery Life.


Battery life of smartphones is a major concern for most users for the simple reason that people are outside and away from their chargers for most parts of the day. Battery life is essential especially in the Android ecosystem, where there are a variety of smartphones ranging from small batteries to relatively bigger ones. Looking at how rapidly the hardware specs of smartphones are taking a leap, it is rather surprising that manufacturers are not quite worried about battery life. Now, there seems to be a new break in technology promising an increase in battery life among mobile devices by up to ten times. The good folks at the Northwestern University (Illinois) have managed to come up with a brilliant idea to improve battery life for the Li-Ion batteries that the smartphone manufacturers use today.

Harold H. Kung, who is responsible for the research paper said, "We have found a way to extend a new lithium-ion battery's charge life by 10 times". He further added, "Even after 150 charges, which would be one year or more of operation, the battery is still five times more effective than lithium-ion batteries on the market today".

Well, the current lot of lithium-ion batteries are based on silicon which has been perfected over the period of time. That being said, the researchers believe that graphene sheets could in turn improve battery life. Hence, they came up with an idea to manufacture batteries with both silicon and graphene. It is hard to leave out silicon since it has a higher value than graphene, but the problem with silicon electrodes is that they tend to slowly expand while being charged. With the combination of silicon and graphene, the researchers expect the battery life to extend up to 10 times. Moreover, 9-10 nm (nanometer) holes were made on the graphene sheet so as to decrease charging time. It could be a remarkable achievement in the field of science if the researchers are able to perfect this new technology. Sadly, there have been many cases like this where researchers come up with something fascinating, but they hardly see the light of the day, and merely remain as a concept. We hope that's not the case here since smartphone manufacturers take battery life lightly, while other aspects such as the display, storage, processor, and design are given more importance. Battery life in general pertains to all operating systems and not Android in general and therefore the manufacturers might want to take this a bit seriously from now on.

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