While our gadgets these days are constantly getting smaller and more powerful, the development of commercial batteries both small enough and with sufficient capacity to feed their power-hungry demands has not quite kept pace.
Most people will have heard of Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries. They’re in almost all mobile electronic devices – from your mobile phone and laptop, through to back-up power supplies on jets and even spacecraft. Surprisingly though, despite this huge demand, the fundamental design of Li-ion batteries has remained broadly similar in recent years.
Battery life is frequently the constraining factor in many existing and experimental applications. It’s key for the future of technologies such as electric cars, and for high-capacity energy storage for renewables such as wind and solar power. In fact the comparatively slow progress with developing new batteries has resulted in many electronics manufacturers turning to trying to reduce or maintain their products’ power requirements to find a balance.
Which is not to say that there’s no research into new energy storage techniques. Far from it in fact. The past few decades have seen an explosion of research in this area. Unsurprisingly, a good deal of this revolves around improving Li-ion batteries. The new “wonder material” graphene has also been suggested as a possible key to the solution. Graphene has a number of interesting properties that have led researchers to suggest either modifying components of Li-ion batteries, or using graphene as the energy-storage medium instead as promising solutions.
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