It’s one of the worst nightmares of any mobile device user (aside from running out of battery of course). You’re charging your smartphone or tablet, or worse, using it, when suddenly, your gadget catches on fire because of overheating. While it doesn’t happen as often as we think it does, it does actually happen. A team of researchers from Stanford believe they’ve come up with a solution by creating the first lithium ion battery that can shut itself down when it’s in danger of becoming too hot.
According to Zhenan Bao, a chemical engineering professor at the university, what they have created is a battery that is able to shut itself down when it detects that it may be overheating. But it doesn’t stop there as it can revive itself when it determines that it is cool enough already and it should function just like before. Their study was published on January 11 at the new journal called Nature Energy. Another engineering professor, Yi Cui, was previously able to create a battery that will warn you if it’s overheating already. But what it wasn’t able to do was to regenerate and be usable again.
But now, Cui worked together with Bao and postdoctoral scholar Zheng Chen and they looked at nanotechnology to be able to solve that issue. Using such materials like graphene, carbon (the atom-thick kind), and elastic polyethylene. If these words didn’t make your brain freeze or fall asleep, then you can click the source link for a more detailed explanation. But basically, these are the things that make their research battery something that OEMs might consider once more testing is done.
Cui said that this version of their battery experiment is the design that “provides a reliable, fast, reversible strategy that can achieve both high battery performance and improved safety.” Let’s see if something can come out of this research and experiment.
VIA: NewsWise
