Charging your Smartphone in a jiffy comes closer to reality

A new battery electrode design from a highly conductive, two-dimensional material called Mxene could pave the way for fully charging your smart phone in just a few seconds, a new study says.

The design, described in the journal Nature Energy, could make energy storage devices like batteries, viewed as the plodding tanker truck of energy storage technology, just as fast as the speedy super capacitors that are used to provide energy in a pinch often as a battery back-up or to provide quick bursts of energy for things like camera flashes.

"This paper refutes the widely accepted dogma that chemical charge storage, used in batteries and pseudo capacitors, is always much slower than physical storage used in electrical double-layer capacitors, also known as super capacitors," said lead researcher Yury Gogotsi, Professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.

"We demonstrate charging of thin MXene electrodes in tens of milliseconds. This is enabled by very high electronic conductivity of MXene. This paves the way to development of ultrafast energy storage devices than can be charged and discharged within seconds, but store much more energy than conventional super capacitors," Gogotsi added.

The overarching benefit of using MXene as the material for the electrode design is its conductivity. "Eventually, appreciation of this fact will lead us to car, laptop and cell-phone batteries capable of charging at much higher rates seconds or minutes rather than hours," Gogotsi added.