Aluminum battery breakthrough: charge a phone in one minute

Who wouldn’t like their smartphone battery to charge in one minute? What we would most of all desire from our batteries is for them to last at least a week, but that doesn’t seem like a development that will be unveiled too soon. Nonetheless, researchers have made a breakthrough in the aluminum battery front which will let smartphone users charge the battery in under a minute, to full capacity. Researchers at Stanford have made a breakthrough in their studies and uncovered a new type of aluminum battery that would be cheap to make, cheap to buy and much safer to use than the conventional lithium ion batteries we use in our smartphones.

The new aluminum battery is made with aluminum and graphite, the first acting as the anode while the second acting as a cathode. Thanks to the aluminum battery’s base material, aluminum, not being as flammable as other substances, the team at Stanford managed to develop a much safer option for smartphone engineers out there. The team, led by Hongjje Dai emphasized that the main benefit of the aluminum battery is its low flammability, compared to lithium ion batteries.

The scientists have developed this new aluminum battery to facilitate uber-fast charging and durability even after more than 7000 charging cycles. The downside of the current prototype of the aluminum battery is that it doesn’t provide a lot of power, which would not make it a feasible release anytime soon. Nonetheless, the team is working on modifying the cathode, graphite, in order to obtain a charge that would last more than conventional batteries. At the moment, the aluminum battery will last about a day used with a smartphone, approximately, which is not a good result in the opinion of the scientists. Since the aluminum battery is also flexible, the team has to find a way in which they can make their new invention the future battery that we use in every smartphone. They haven’t given a timeline as to when this might happen, but they are hard at work to bring this to market.