Lithium Batteries Charged In Seconds

Think of your laptop, cellphone, digital camera, or even hybrid car. They all have one thing in common. They use lithium-ion battery technology. Most of today's electronic devices which rely on a portable power source, use lithium-ion batteries.

In Yesterday's issue of Nature, two researchers, Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, published an article regarding a revolutionary breakthrough in charging time for those kind of batteries. Their discovery might lead to a laptop battery being fully charged in about one minute.

"The speed at which a battery can charge is limited by how fast its electrons and ions can move - particularly through its electrodes. Researchers have boosted these rates by building electrodes from nanoparticle clumps, reshaping their surfaces, and using additives such as carbon. But for most lithium-ion batteries, powering up still takes hours: in part because the lithium ions, once generated, move sluggishly from the cathode material to the electrolyte.

That seemed to be the case for lithium iron phosphate, a material that is used in the cathode of a small number of commercial batteries. But when Ceder and Kang did some calculations, they saw that the compound could theoretically do much better. Its crystal structure creates "perfectly sized tunnels for lithium to move through", says Ceder. "We saw that we could reach ridiculously fast charging rates."

The authors helped the ions by coating the surface of the cathode with a thin layer of lithium phosphate glass, which is known to be an excellent lithium conductor. Testing their newly-coated cathode, they found that they could charge and discharge it in as little as 9 seconds." [via Nature]

Update 03-13-2009: As the German magazine "Spiegel" reports, this new technology was already licensed to two companies and will be available in new products, in about two to three years.