New Type Of Screen Glass Material could double your smartphone's battery life ~ DepoTech

The batteries inside our smartphones and laptops are fighting a losing battle when it comes to keeping these devices juiced up.
A team of ETH Zurich researchers led by Dr. Semih Afyon and Reinhard Nesper have discovered a new type of glass material that could make a major difference: vanadate-borate glass.
The material used in the formation of the glass are the chemical components- vanadium oxide (V2O5) and lithium-borate (LiBO2) precursors.These chemicals are later covered with a coating of reduced graphite oxide (RGO).

The basic idea behind the project was to find a material which could both store battery capacity effectively and take a frequent number of charge cycles, while staying stable enough to be viable for use in modern-day electronics.

However, crystalline vanadium pentoxide cannot release all of the inserted Li-ions and only allows a few stable charge/discharge cycles. This is because once the lithium ions penetrate the crystalline lattice during the loading process, the lattice expands. As a result, an electrode particle swells as a whole, i.e. it increases in volume only to shrink again once the charges leave the particle. This process may lead to instabilities in the electrode material in terms of structural changes and contact losses.

Researchers therefore had to find a way to retain the structure of the initial material while maximizing the capacity and also maintaining its ability to “take” the charges, which is how they devised the idea of using vanadium as a glass rather than in its crystalline form. In glass, a so-called “amorphous” material, atoms do not arrange themselves in a regular lattice as they do when they are in a crystalline state. Instead, the atoms exist in a state of wild disarray.

Dr. Afyon said, “What we need is new chemistry and novel compounds to obtain safe, better and longer lasting batteries.” He also said that the vanadate-boarate glass compound his team has developed could extend smartphone battery life by 1.5 to 2 times and allow electric cars to travel 1.5 times further. These numbers are theoretically based for now. The technology has numerous uses including making better batteries for electric cars, boats and bikes. Another purpose the vanadate-borate glass could potentially be used for is wind farms and solar powered plants that need to store generated electricity effectively for when it’s required. It might take 10 to 20 years before we see this technology actually appear in a device. Fingers crossed till that time!