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The battery breakthrough that could charge your iPhone in five SECONDS

March 1, 2013

Graphene-based supercapacitors can charge and discharge thousand times faster than conventional batteries
Prototypes cane be produced using a standard DVD burner

Researchers have revealed a radical new type of battery that could charge a mobile phone or even a car in seconds.

Called micro-scale graphene-based supercapacitors, the devices can charge and discharge a hundred to a thousand times faster than standard batteries.

Made from a one-atom–thick layer of carbon, can be easily manufactured and readily integrated into gadgets - and could even lead to far smaller phones.

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The micro-supercapacitors the team created using a DVD burner. They can charge and discharge upto a thousand times faster than traditional batteries

The team say their breakthrough could least to faster charging phones and cars, but also smaller gadgets.

'The integration of energy-storage units with electronic circuits is challenging and often limits the miniaturization of the entire system,' said Richard Kaner, who is a professor of materials science and engineering at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science.

To develop their new micro-supercapacitor, the researchers used a two-dimensional sheet of carbon, known as graphene, which only has the thickness of a single atom in the third dimension.

The team also found a way to produce the new batteries easily - using a standard DVD burner.

'Traditional methods for the fabrication of micro-supercapacitors involve labor-intensive lithographic techniques that have proven difficult for building cost-effective devices, thus limiting their commercial application,' El-Kady said.

'Instead, we used a consumer-grade LightScribe DVD burner to produce graphene micro-supercapacitors over large areas at a fraction of the cost of traditional devices.

'Using this technique, we have been able to produce more than 100 micro-supercapacitors on a single disc in less than 30 minutes, using inexpensive materials.'

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