Aluminum battery recharges in 1 second

Flexibility enables wrap-around smartphones.

A flexible battery made from low-cost, plentiful materials and which can recharge instantly is the Holy Grail of energy storage technology. Now Stanford University claims to have achieved this goal. Called aluminum battery, it uses a flexible aluminum foil anode, a graphite foam cathode, and liquid salt as an electrolyte, and can be recharged in 1 second.

"People have worked on aluminum ion batteries, but they all had low voltages and poor cycle life spans. The aluminum/graphite battery was actually discovered by accident, but we were able to improve the performance once we knew that graphite was a good cathode candidate," Ming Gong, a doctoral candidate working in professor Hongjie Dai's laboratory at Stanford University, told EE Times.

A porous graphite cathode appears to have been the secret sauce enabling the aluminum battery to rival Li-on kinds when its prototype was first built.

Today, the former's version produces only 2.5V, forcing two to be used in series to achieve the 5V most devices require. Its capacity is one-third of that of a Li-ion battery. The Coulombic efficiency, however, is high at more than 95 percent, giving the team optimism capacity and other qualities can be improved just as optimization enhanced the performance of Li-ion counterparts.

To read the rest of the article, please go to EETimes.

See a comparison table of selected Li-polymer battery pack suppliers on GlobalSources.com