Most kids these days use sugar as a source of super-efficient fuel, over-clocking their supercharged bodies into a short burst of uncontrollable hyperactive brain power. It doesn’t last long, but whilst it’s there, the kids feel almost impenetrable.

In the upcoming years, it may be possible that household batteries could use sugar as a similar fuel method, but in a much more efficient way.

At first this sounds a little crazy, but research by a group at the Tokyo University of Science has led Professor Shinichi Komaba to the confirmation that hard carbon extracted from pyroylizing sucrose, an important constituent in sugar, is capable of replacing traditional anode material for sodium ion batteries, a common battery type for household rechargeables.

The hard carbon can be easy to manufacture too; by heating sucrose in an electric furnace at 1 thousand to 1,500 degrees Celsius in an environment free from oxygen, sucrose powder can be produced into black hard carbon powder.

The latest research follows years of hard work and study, but it looks as if the researchers in charge of the project are coming closer to their goals, and can now extract hard carbon from sugar with a storage capacity of 300 mAh, 20% higher than that of traditionally manufactured hard carbon.

“We’ve spent about seven years researching sodium ion batteries. We’ve gained a lot of know-how regarding electrolytes and cells for such batteries. We have all the reagents needed right here.”

How long do you think it will be before we see sugar-powered batteries in our day-to-day lives? How could this help the world as a whole? We’d love to hear your opinions in the comments.

[Source]

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It’s inventions like this that make me so proud to be a Canadian. Maksim Skorobogatiy and his colleagues at the Polytechnic School of Montreal have come up with a way that has flat, flexible batteries built right into garment fabric.

This is quite different from what we already see in some other clothing. Those t-shirts with the flashing LEDs have a battery pack sewn onto them. Vests with solar panels have batteries laid over top (or underneath) them. What these Canadian scientists have been able to create is a flexible fabric where the batteries are actually integrated in the fabric itself.

In order to build their battery, they sandwich a solid polyethylene oxide electrolyte between a lithium iron phosphate cathode and lithium titanate anode. All of these are thermoplastic materials, which can be stretched under mild heating.

It’s fully wearable and fully flexible without using any liquid electrolytes. The trouble is that the artificial leather-like material is not yet waterproof or washable. When it is, they expect to see all sorts of application, from portable debrillating to medical monitoring.  I wonder if that liquipel technology would help?

Photo Top: Tron [ Source: PDF Link ]

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Inside Li-ion there are innumerable layers of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms. Lithium ions fill the spaces between these layers and when the bettery is being charged the atoms make their way to the edge of the sheet in order to get down to the next layer and make room for more ions. The speed of recharging is limited by how quickly these ions can get from layer to layer.

Professor Harold Kung at NU has discovered two techniques for improving this charge process. His lab decided to combine the strengths of carb and silicon by populating the area between the graphene sheets with silicon nanoclusters. These clusters greatly increase the amount of ions that can reside in the battery. The end result is a charge capacity that is greatly improved.

Kung’s lab took it one step further by perforating the graphene sheets which allowed the ions to take shortcuts to get to the next layer, this resulted in the major increase in charging speed.

As with many technologies there is a downside, and with the new battery technology it could possibly degrade quickly. After about 150 charges and discharges the batteries only showed a 5x improvement to capacity and charge speed over current li-ion batteries.

According to the researchers behind the new techniques, this form of li-ion battery could reach the market in about three to five years. Although this means I will forever be doomed to suffer from bad battery life with my current phone, perhaps in the next few years this will all change for the better. Keep in mind though that technology breakthroughs are made every day by universities and research centers, and many of these never see commercial reaches. For now I will keep my fingers crossed and hope, because we could all use better battery life in our favorite mobile devices.

The post New Li-Ion Technology Charges 10x Faster, Holds 10x More appeared first on Mobile Magazine.