A small piece of colourful metal may not look very impressive, but under the microscope it holds a new technology that will revolutionise electronics.
Just about anything that requires batteries will be ready to use almost immediately.
Researchers at the University of Illinois have created a honey-comb like structure that can help get electrons in and out of a battery a hundred times faster than existing types. For electric cars, that means instead of charging overnight, soon they could be charged in the same time it takes to fill up a tank of petrol.
Kiwi technology developer Peter Lee’s company has already developed technology that allows huge amounts of energy to be transferred across a gap without wires.
So a car could drive onto a pad and the power be transferred through the air very quickly, but until now there hasn’t been a battery that can absorb it at such speed. Combining the technologies could create a major breakthrough.
“There’s not much use having a rapidly charging battery if you can’t get the power out of the grid into the car quickly, and there’s not much point having the ability to get power rapidly into a car if the battery can’t absorb it fast. The two have to go together so that’s why this is a very promising combination of technologies,” he says.
Peter Lee says the thing that’s made electric cars unaffordable is the weight and size of the batteries, but if the two technologies allow car batteries to be charged often, quickly and conveniently, that suddenly makes the electric car a much more realistic alternative to petrol-powered cars. But the batteries won’t be available to regular consumers for another three to five years.
