Have you ever heard of "Nomophobia" ?
It's the fear of having to be without your phone - whether you lost it, misplaced it, or it's run out of battery.
As made-up as that sounds, it's a real condition!
We all know this problem - we have a busy day ahead of us, but at lunch time our phone is already at 15%.
What to do?
Since apple introduced the "low battery mode" on iPhones, many users turn that on right from the start of the day to prevent running out of battery.
But often enough, it still happens.
That's why "powerbanks" or portable external batteries have become increasingly popular over the last couple of years - one full battery charge just isn't enough!
Now finally, scientists from the University of Central Florida have found a solution to counter this daily problem of low-battery-anxiety!
The researchers have created a new type of supercapacitor batteries.
These could charge your phone in a matter of seconds, and then your battery would last for a week!
That sounds almost too good to be true - right?
Well, the technology is still in its early stages - but still, the concept is there and has a huge potential !
So how does this revolutionary technology work?
Standard Lithium-Ion Batteries work based on chemical reactions.
But supercapacitors on the other hand manage to capture static electricity on the surface.
To make use of this, the UCF researchers have combined the supercapacitors with "„Two-Dimensional Transition-Metal Dichalcogenides" (2D-TMD).
This enables electrons to move between the core and the shell at a very high speed.
"You could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week.""We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials."
-Nitin Choudhary and Eric Jung from the UCF Researcher Team
Traditional Li-Ion Batteries used in smartphones today dramatically decrease in performance after only 1500 charging cycles.
You have probably noticed that already - after a few months, your phone battery lasts for a much shorter time period than it did in the beginning.
But these supercapacitors could be recharged up to 30.000 times without any loss in performance!
A battery like that would be 20-times as durable as our standard Lithium-Ion Batteries.
""It's not ready for commercialisation, but this is a proof-of-concept demonstration, and our studies show there are very high impacts for many technologies."-Eric Jung
The work has been published in ACS Nano in October.
It's still in early development stages, but imagine how this could change our lives if it becomes commercial.
No more running out of juice at the worst possible moment, no more chargers or external batteries to carry around, and no more desperate searching for an outlet you could use.
This technology could even be used in the automotive industry for electrical cars, which currently still take several hours to charge.
It could also make the batteries and therefore the whole car much lighter.
I hope charging your devices in seconds will become a reality in the near future!
Images: 1, 2, 3 , Sources: 1, 2, 3
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Sirwinchester