An Israeli company has developed a battery made from organic materials that can charge a phone in 30 seconds and a laptop in minutes.
Startup StoreDot demonstrated its Flash Battery technology at the Microsoft Think Next symposium in Tel Aviv by charging a Samsung S4 smartphone from dead to full in 26 seconds.
The Flash Battery uses biological semiconductors, or ‘NanoDots’, made from naturally occurring organic compounds discovered during Alzheimer’s disease research at Tel Aviv University. The self-assembling NanoDots have high electrode capacitance and increased electrolyte performance.
Inside the unit, artificially synthesised organic crystals two nanometres long extend the electrodes’ reactive surfaces and, StoreDot says, increase their capacity by a factor of 10. The NanoDots make the electrode ‘multi-function’, storing electrical energy to create a capacitor at one end and working like a slow-discharge lithium electrode at the other.
Because they are organic, the compounds are easy and cheap to make from “a vast range of bio-organic raw materials that are readily available and environmentally friendly”, StoreDot says, as well as being non-toxic.
The current Flash Battery prototype is roughly the size of a standard laptop charger, but StoreDot says it is working on making it smaller and able to fit inside a smartphone. The first models, set to come on the market in 2016, will cost twice as much as a standard phone charger but should have improved battery life in the long run, the company says.
“Batteries are just one of the industries we can disrupt with this new material,” said Dr Doron Myersdorf, the company’s founder and CEO. “It is new physics, new chemistry, a new approach to devices.”
