Researchers Report Super-Powered Battery Breakthrough

another random user writes with news that researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are reporting a breakthrough in battery technology. They say: "With currently available power sources, users have had to choose between power and energy. For applications that need a lot of power, like broadcasting a radio signal over a long distance, capacitors can release energy very quickly but can only store a small amount. For applications that need a lot of energy, like playing a radio for a long time, fuel cells and batteries can hold a lot of energy but release it or recharge slowly. ... The new microbatteries offer both power and energy, and by tweaking the structure a bit, the researchers can tune them over a wide range on the power-versus-energy scale (abstract). The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries have two key components: the anode (minus side) and cathode (plus side). Building on a novel fast-charging cathode design by materials science and engineering professor Paul Braun’s group, King and Pikul developed a matching anode and then developed a new way to integrate the two components at the microscale to make a complete battery with superior performance. With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available."

The Fine Print

[Darth Cider]

From the supplemental material: "The energy densities of the microbatteries are initially superior to the supercapcitors, but lose an average 5% total energy density after each cycle."

Re:That was the most worthless infomercial ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The whole article is full of vague comparison like 30 times farther, 30 times smaller, 1000 times faster etc. The abstract does not even talk about energy density. It only talks about power density. Even that is blatantly exaggerated. Based on the abstract, it translated to max 74 W/cm^3. The article claims, cell phone using batteries few millimeter in size can jump start a car. How is this possible unless the definition of "few" is overstretched and use a cell phone of the size of olden days public phone.

Yes it does

[geekoid]

"Here we report lithium ion microbatteries having power densities up to 7.4mWcm2m1,which equals or exceeds that of the best supercapacitors, and which is 2,000 times higher than that of other microbatteries."

WTF more do you want? you can calculate almost everything from there.

Sheesh.

Re:Yes it does

[fnj]

"Here we report lithium ion microbatteries having power densities up to 7.4mWcm2m1,which equals or exceeds that of the best supercapacitors, and which is 2,000 times higher than that of other microbatteries."
WTF more do you want? you can calculate almost everything from there.

For god's sake, if you're going to quote technical math, can't you at least get it transcribed right? 7.4mWcm2m1 is utter nonsense. I realize for reasons unknown slashdot does not implement even elementary HTML markup like Greek letters, superscript and subscript. Preview shows garbage from cut and paste, so just improvise.

The article says 7.4 mW cm^-2 micrometer^-1, which are pretty bizarre units, but readily convertinle to 74 GW/m^3, or 74 MW/liter. That gives us the power density in meaningful form, and it seems pretty damn impressive to me.