Indian-American Teen Creates 20 Second Mobile Charger [Video]
Short charge life of a normal mobile phone battery has been a universal problem. Even though Smartphones are getting more and more powerful, the battery life still remains a huge bottleneck for their growth. Even the most superior smartphones today struggle to offer full day battery life with moderate usage.
Its not the battery alone, but the charging times is also an issue – Generally, a normal mobile phone takes atleast a couple of hours to get to a full charge. So, it is very difficult to completely charge your battery when on the move.
But looks like a 18 year old Indian American girl Eesha Khare has found a problem to the solution with her invention. She has come up with a small device that can be fitted inside mobile phone batteries and could them in about 20 to 30 seconds.
This invention won her Young Scientist Award by the Intel Foundation, which also carried a prize money of USD 50,000.
According to her, the tiny device has has a life of 10,000 recharge cycles as compared to 1000 cycles of traditional rechargeable batteries.
Here is a video of Eesha Khare at the Young Scientist Awards function and her talking about her invention.
The core of Eesha’s discovery is super capacitors – These are storage devices that can be charged or discharged a hundred or a thousand times faster than regular batteries. However, the problem is that their fabrication is both costly and cumbersome.
Here is an excerpt from Eesha’s whitepaper that talks about how she made this 20 second charger.
[box type=”info” ]To improve supercapacitor energy density, I designed, synthesized, and characterized a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogenated TiO2 (H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell. H-TiO2 acts as the double layer electrostatic core. Good conductivity of H-TiO2 combined with the high pseudocapacitance of polyaniline results in significantly higher overall capacitance and energy density while retaining good power density and cycle life. This new electrode was fabricated into a flexible solid-state device to light an LED to test it in a practical application.[/box]
Earlier last year, another UCLA researcher had made a DVD based super capacitor that created over a week’s batter on single hour of recharge. What the researchers did was used graphite oxide to coat a plastic layer on a disk and used the laser in the DVD-burner to create super micro-capacitors. You can read more about it here.
Overall, it looks like the next big thing in mobile phones is going to be the battery life. Imagine how great would it be to have a week long battery on your smartphone, or a battery that could be re-charged in 20 seconds.
I hope these inventions soon start becoming commercially viable and become available on today’s devices, which desperately need them!