No one enjoys waiting for their phone to charge — but using a phone with low battery can be even more stressful. Fortunately, researchers from Drexel University have developed a new battery electrode design that has the potential to eliminate both of those problems. They recently published their work in the journal Nature Energy.
The team, led by Dr. Yury Gogotsi, created the new electrode design from a highly conductive, two-dimensional material called MXene. What sets MXene apart from traditional battery designs is its ability to open up more paths for ions to move quickly throughout the material.
Because electrodes are the components of batteries that store and disburse energy, this breakthrough design has the potential to change battery composition and the current charging process. With this new technology, cell phone charging times have the potential to be reduced from hours to seconds.
MXene is, basically, a hydrogel that is compressed between oxide metal. It is highly conductive, similar to the copper and aluminum used in electrical wiring, which helps ions move throughout the material without much resistance. Mxene also creates multiple paths for ions to travel through, which means that a higher quantity of ions can reach charging ports at a faster rate. Additionally, MXene has more ports than in traditional batteries and supercapacitors, so there are more places for ions to enter and leave the battery. This increases efficiency.
Traditional batteries, on the other hand, have a much slower charging process as there is a limited path for ions to get to the ports that charge your device.
“This paper refutes the widely accepted dogma that chemical charge storage, used in batteries and pseudocapacitors, is always slower than physical storage used in electrical double-layer capacitors, also known as supercapacitors,” Gogotsi said in an interview with DrexelNow. “We demonstrate charging of thin MXene electrodes in tens of milliseconds. This is enabled by very high electronic conductivity of MXene. This paves the way to development of ultrafast energy storage devices than can be charged and discharged within seconds, but store much more energy than conventional supercapacitors.”
Drexel researchers have actually been developing and studying MXene since 2011. Besides battery charging, it has been tested in other applications such as electromagnetic radiation shielding and water filtering.
While MXene won’t be commercially available or integrated into current technology, its existence is promising not only for phone batteries, but laptop and electric car batteries as well.