“Though they be but little, they are fierce,” writes Liz Ahlberg, physical sciences editor at the University of Illinois News Brueau. She writes that the most powerful batteries on the planet are only a few millimeters in size, yet they pack such a punch that a driver could use a cellphone powered by one to jump-start a car. (The phone's USB connector might be a limiting factor here!)
Ahlberg is referring to new microbatteries, developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which can out-power supercapacitors and drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics.
She quotes William P. King, the Bliss Professor of mechanical science and engineering, as saying, “This is a whole new way to think about batteries. A battery can deliver far more power than anybody ever thought. In recent decades, electronics have gotten small. The thinking parts of computers have gotten small. And the battery has lagged far behind. This is a microtechnology that could change all of that. Now the power source is as high-performance as the rest of it.”
The batteries owe their performance to a 3-D microstructure design that employs a fast-charging cathode and matching anode.
Read Ahlberg's complete article here, where you will also find a link to access the April Nature Communications paper “High Power Lithium Ion Micro Batteries From Interdigitated Three-Dimensional Bicontinuous Nanoporous Electrodes,” by James H. Pikul, Hui Gang Zhang, Jiung Cho, Paul V. Braun, and William P. King.
Power and energy topics have been in the news a lot recently. Read these related stories:
