Anyone who owns a smartphone knows how real a struggle sustaining battery life is. It’s a seemingly impossible task. You just know you’re going to run out of juice sooner than you think, and you probably have a charger at home, at work, in your car – and no doubt one or two power banks as well.
(power banks: portable battery chargers)
It’s not like phone makers are doing it on purpose to make us suffer (though it may seem like it). In fact, they are constantly trying to develop technology to extend battery life. Samsung recently thought up a potential solution to this problem.
Although their models such as the Galaxy Note 4 and Galaxy 6 already have decent battery lives – especially compared to the iPhone – Samsung wants more reliable technology that’s twice as good as what they’re using now. Good news for everyone all around!
It’s About Energy Density
A group of Samsung-affiliated researchers along with other materials scientists have discovered that a new graphene-coated silicon it could be the solution. By using this new material for the anode instead of the graphite cathode that’s being used now, tests have shown that a battery would have an initial energy density 1.8x that of current batteries, dropping to a still respectable 1.5x after continued use.
If you want a more detailed technical explanation about how this is achieved, check out the results they published in Nature Communications: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/150625/ncomms8393/full/ncomms8393.html.
(Image from the above Nature.com article)
Don’t get too excited yet. This new tech is just that – it’s new – so don’t expect it to show up in this year’s crop of smartphones. More studies and safety checks will need to be done before it’s released. Don’t want any more exploding battery incidents…
Samsung is still awaiting patent approval in Korea, China, U.S. and Europe. Also LG is working on a hexagonal battery with a somewhat similar technology focused on smart watches that can improve battery storage by 25%.
The more people working on solving this issue, the better for all of us!
It was about time to do something about batteries. It’s a shame we won’t see it up too soon, though. The battery for smartphones is really an issue, so having a new tech one is a requirement. Samsung should hurry if the others don’t, because the new battery life will bring them really good profit.
As an iPhone touch owner I really like how this idea looks, most of the time it’s really annoying to have to charge your phone every couple of hours of use, imagine if this would happen during an emergency, it seems to be a really bad scenario, so I’m looking forward to see if other cell phone companies (such as apple) try this new method, or make their own.
It was a pretty interesting read, thank you so much for sharing. 🙂