Researchers develop new process to make smartphones charge faster

Smartphone may soon become smart charging as scientists have developed a new process to make the devices charge in seconds.

Researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in the US have developed a process to create flexible supercapacitors that could store more energy and be recharged more than 30,000 times without beginning to degrade.

"If they were to replace the batteries with these super capacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week," said Nitin Choudhary, a postdoctoral associate at UCF.

The supercapacitors were still proof-of-concept and could be used in phones and other electronic gadgets, and electric vehicles, according to the study published in journal ACS Nano.

Smartphone users are quite familiar  with the problem as the capacity of batteries to hold charge over a period of time decreases with battery degradation set in.

Scientists had been considering using nanomaterials to improve supercapacitors that could enhance or even replace batteries in electronic devices. But the problem with that was that the supercapacitor that held as much energy as a lithium-ion battery would have to be much, much larger.

The team therefore turned to newly discovered two-dimensional materials only a few atoms thick to make supercapacitors.  

Yeonwoong "Eric" Jung from UCF and his team wrapped 2D metal materials (TMDs) just a few atoms thick around highly-conductive 1D nanowires, letting electrons pass quickly from the core to the shell. That produced a fast charging material with high energy and power density that was relatively simple to produce. "We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials," Jung said.

The research which is in its stages is not yet ready for commercialisation, but it looked promising. "For small electronic devices, our materials are surpassing the conventional ones worldwide in terms of energy density, power density and cyclic stability," Choudhary said.