Teen’s invention could charge your phone in 20 seconds
Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student’s invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds.
Maddening omission of what the capacity of the system actually is, because this is great, if it actually works as advertised. There is the implication above, that it’s the same capacity as a phone battery, but that’s contradicted in other stories. Which means we don’t know if this will scale up or end up on the list of failed promises, like those room-temperature superconductors on mag-lev trains we were promised were imminent, back in the 90’s.
This report implies that it’s not ready for that just yet.
Her experiment used the supercapacitor to power an LED, but both Khare and Intel believe the same tech can be used to similar effect on a smartphone.
Powering an LED is a far cry from powering a phone. The article doesn’t say how long the LED ran. Several hours? Or just a few minutes?
The INTEL press release is even more confusing.
She developed a tiny device that fits inside cell phone batteries, allowing them to fully charge within 20-30 seconds.
It’s being used to fully charge a battery? That doesn’t make sense. A cell phone battery’s capacity is around 1500 mAh at around 3.7 V. Charging it in 30 seconds would require ~670 Watts, though it’s 180 Amps at 3.7V (but under 6 amps at the wall outlet). The obstacle isn’t the availability of the raw power to the battery, it’s efficiently delivering the charge to the battery without melting anything, including the battery, so without modifying the battery you still run into the problem of the battery not “liking” to be charged quickly — they tend to get hot. It makes more sense that this would be used as a substitute for (or an auxiliary to) the battery, and the supercapacitor is what can be charged quickly.
If it can be scaled up.
While quick charging is nice, rapid discharging isn’t — and the two usually go together.
If there was a malfunction and the battery was able to dump 670 watts into a phone over 30 seconds you would feel that in your pocket!
Maddening as they are, slow charging devices are probably much safer.
I wonder if there’s some confusion in how things are being defined–perhaps everyone’s just calling “that thing that holds electrical energy and fits in the battery chassis” a “battery”, rather than defining it as something holds energy entirely through electrical potentials. (The difference between that and a pseudocapacitor, on the other hand, I really don’t understand).
How you’d keep these things from not rapidly discharging, though…