Have you heard of graphene? If not this little wonder material could be the thing that helps your smartphone last longer than half a day in the not so distant future. We examine how this material will help your mobile phones battery life be extended by up to ten times.

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Graphene Will Improve Smartphone
Batteries Life Ten Times
Have you heard of graphene? If not this little won-
der material could be the thing that helps your
smartphone last longer than half a day in the not
so distant future. We examine how this material will
help your mobile phones battery life be extended
by up to ten times.
Graphene the wonder material improves
battery life:
We have talked about smartphone battery life issues
in various articles, ranging from one big moan to a
guide on getting the most from your devices puny
little battery.
But now we are hearing that the wonderful material
the we wrote about ages ago called Graphene could
end up being a smartphone battery saviour, as well
as its material of choice in years to come.
Improved battery life for smartphones –
the holy grail:
Now when you hear of people playing down theissue
of battery life, ask yourself this, would you rather
it improved or happy that it stayed the same?It has
been quite the challenge to ensure that our belo-
ved mobile devices can keep up with the amount of
power that we bestow in them, and where “moores”
law dictates that things can get smaller and smaller
and quicker and quicker, the law of the “li-ion” does
not follow suit, so having a laptop inside a thimble
with quad core processing makes for one particu-
larly pathetic thimble, apart from the five minutes
that it can open up iTunes in two seconds flat and
play Angry birds for mice in 3D. Yes, it looks pretty
cool for a while, but alas they never last!
You see there is only one answer to that, and where
I can safely, and happily say that my smartphone
screen should stay the same size, the battery life
does need improving.
Smartphone battery charge time
increased by a factor of ten?
Taking a look at a TechCrunch article from back
in November that I totally missed, it would appear
that a professor at Northwestern university called
Harold Kung has devised an ingenious way of uti-
lising the wonder material that is graphene and
integrating it into the structure of li-ion batteries
in order to increase both the charge capacity and
charge speed of this type of battery.
They key is in the way Graphene is layered in
between the lithium ions, as the ions move across
December 24, 2011
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/graphene-will-improve-smartphone-batteries-life-ten-times/
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Graphene Will Improve Smartphone Batteries Life Ten Times
the layers of graphene, the speed in which this oc-
curs directly relates to the speed that it can charge.
Helping to accelerate this process the professor de-
cided to poke millions of tiny holes into the graphene
layers of around 10-20nm in size, this helped to pro-
vide a “shortcut” for the ions to travel. Which in-turn
helped to charge the battery ten times quicker than
normal cells would be able to achieve.
Smartphone battery capacity extended:
So
not only has professor Harold Kung found a way to
speed up the charge time for li-ion batteries, he then
went on to mess about with some more concepts
and test the results out.
The second of which increased the overall capacity
of the battery by another factor of ten, meaning that
you could almost get a full week from one charge
if these were to be rolled out as production battery
sets.
And the key to this achievement was the fact that
graphene is so malleable, and so avoided negative
effects of the silicon expansion issues that beset
earlier attempts to achieve similar results.
Essentially, what is needed to increase the capacity
of li-ion batteries is to be able to insert small clusters
of silicon in between each graphene slice which al-
lows more ions to collect and gather at the electrode
end, increasing capacity, the fact that graphene and
silicon are malleable helps this process work.
“Now we almost have the best of both worlds,
we have much higher energy density because
of the silicon, and the sandwiching reduces the
capacity loss caused by the silicon expanding
and contracting. Even if the silicon clusters
break up, the silicon won’t be lost.”
The downside is that the charge capacity and speed
of charge degrades sharply after 150 charges, but
as was pointed out, you are pretty much well into
your second year of use at that point as the charge
lasts so long anyway.
This is seriously great news for device manufac-
turers who right now need to work on ways to im-
prove their smartphone battery life until this kind
of technology becomes affordable, and practical and
is present in every single phone sold.
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December 24, 2011
http://www.batteryfast.co.uk/battery-technology/graphene-will-improve-smartphone-batteries-life-ten-times/
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