What if charging your phone took less time than brushing your teeth? A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences could very well hold the key to a next-gen charger capable of recharging your phone in just 60 seconds.

Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered a new cutting-edge technique that could make it possible to charge devices almost instantaneously. This would make charging phones, laptops, and even electric cars much more efficient and convenient. The foundation of the new technique is based on new insights into how ions move through supercapacitors.

The key, one of the researchers explains in a press release, is to make the movement of the ions more efficient. By doing this we can make the charging and release of energy much faster, allowing for that next-gen charger that is capable of boosting your phone’s charge from 0 to 100 in just a minute, or maybe even less.

To make this discovery, the researchers looked at the movement of ions through a complex network of interconnected pores running through the supercapacitor. Their findings have helped modify a scientific law that researchers have used to govern electrical currents for more than 175 years. This law, called the Kirchhoff circuit law, describes the flow of electrons in a simple loop of wiring in most classes.

However, when inspecting the ions and their movement, the researchers found that the ions move fundamentally differently at the intersections of tiny nanoscale pores when compared to how electrons move near the same locations. Further observations helped them determine that these movements are different from what Kirchhoff’s law describes. This doesn’t completely throw out the old laws, though, as they still provide valid explanations for how electronics flow within conventional electronic circuits.

However, to create a next-gen charger capable of taking full advantage of the movements of the ions, we have to look at things different. This, the researchers say, is “the missing link” that they have been looking for. Creating more efficient energy storage has been a long-term goal for many engineers.

We’ve seen water-based batteries capable of storing more than traditional lithium-ion batteries. Still, a method that lets us charge our batteries almost instantly would remove a lot of the hindrances surrounding the wider adoption of things like electric cars. Not to mention how much more convenient a next-gen character would make charging laptops, phones, and other electronic devices.

  • Thevenin@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    Yeah, no. This is not about chargers or batteries or phones or cars. This study is about improved charge/discharge rates for supercapacitors.

    Supercaps have very high flow rate, but extremely low capacity. Put them in a phone or a car and it would run very fast for five minutes. Supercaps are useful, don’t get me wrong, but they’re not batteries.

    Very cool research from UC Boulder, but the journalism leans way too far into clickbait.

    • TonyTonyChopper@mander.xyz
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      4 months ago

      The bigger issue I would see is the heat created from dumping all that energy in at once. And can a US outlet even provide that much power?

      • Thevenin@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        Solid point. A laptop battery is around 60Wh, and charging that in 1 minute would pull 3.6kW from the outlet, or roughly double what a US residential outlet can deliver.

        Supercaps stay pretty cool under high current charging/discharging, but your laptop would have to be the size of a mini fridge.

        The research paper itself was only talking about using the tech for wearable electronics, which tend to be tiny. The article probably made the cars-and-phones connection for SEO. Good tech, bad journalism.

      • brie@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        Increasing capacitance (how much charge is stored to reach a certain voltage) or the voltage it is charged to would indeed increase the capacity. Putting several in parallel would work, as would making a bigger capacitor. The main problem as far as I can tell is that the energy density of even supercapacitors is low, so you’d need a much larger volume to have the same capacity (and thus a much thicker phone).

          • Thevenin@beehaw.org
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            4 months ago

            Yeah, this matches my experience.

            A supercapacitor buffer will cost around twice as much and deliver around 1/10th the watt-hours of a similarly-sized lead acid battery. And lead acid isn’t exactly great to begin with.

            Capacitors are useful, but only in applications where the total amount of energy stored is more-or-less unimportant.

      • sleepybisexual@beehaw.org
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        4 months ago

        Well, yea. Tho it would be cool to be able to slow charging down in software, I wanna sleep while charging without overcharge

        • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️@yiffit.net
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          4 months ago

          That exists. It’s called adaptive charging. If you have a modern Pixel: Just set an alarm before plugging the phone in, and it will slow the charge to hit 100% when the alarm goes off. I don’t know what other phones have this feature but I’m pretty sure it’s just part of Android 14 if the hardware is compatible.

          • Markaos@lemmy.one
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            4 months ago

            It doesn’t slow charge, at least not on Pixel 7a. Well, you could argue whether 20W is slow charging, but it’s all this phone can do.

            It just charges normally to 80%, stops, and then resumes charging about an hour or two before the alarm. And last time I used it, it had a cool bug where if it fails to reach 80% by the point in time when it’s supposed to resume charging, it will just stop charging no matter what the current charge level is. Since that experience, I just turned this feature off and charge it in whenever it starts running low.

          • Ilandar@aussie.zone
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            4 months ago

            It has been available in some form since Android 11. It’s no longer limited to Pixels - my Motorola has a similar feature caller optimised charging, which doesn’t even require alarms. LineageOS also has like 3 different ways to limit charging. In short, you definitely do not need root.

        • theonyltruemupf@feddit.de
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          4 months ago

          Fairphone 5 can force slow charging via settings. I use it all the time because I usually charge over night and it helps preserve battery life.

        • meseek #2982@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          That is another matter altogether. Apple has that feature that limits the charge to 80%. Easily done. In fact, as we move to AI, we can create much more intelligent charging schemes that can be tailored to the user.

          But when it comes to actual charge times, obviously less is better. Not sure why anyone in their right mind would get upset over lower times and claim that things are fine now. It’s like fighting against electricity because you love your typewriter.

          • Jesus_666@feddit.de
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            4 months ago

            Android already does that, no AI required. Some fairly simple math is enough.

            The device first charges to 80% and holds there. It also calculates how long it will need to charge from there to full and when it will need to resume charging so that it will hit 100% just before the next alarm goes off. Then it does that.

          • sleepybisexual@beehaw.org
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            4 months ago

            Yea, tho, with fast charging like this. My single 33w charger already makes devices hot, this could cause that too

          • Markaos@lemmy.one
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            4 months ago

            If it doesn’t come at the expense of battery wear, then sure, lower charge time is just better. But that would make phone batteries the only batteries that don’t get excessively stressed when fast charging. Yeah, phone manufacturers generally claim that fast charging is perfectly fine for the battery, but I’m not sure I believe them too much when battery degradation is one of the main reasons people buy new phones.

            I have no clue how other manufacturers do it (so for all I know they could all be doing it right and actually use slow charging), but Google has a terrible implementation of battery conservation - Pixels just fast charge to 80%, then wait until some specific time before the alarm, then fast charge the rest. Compare that to a crappy Lenovo IdeaPad laptop I have that has a battery conservation feature that sets a charge limit AND a power limit (60% with 25W charging), because it wouldn’t make sense to limit the charge and still use full 65W for charging.

  • Lad@reddthat.com
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    4 months ago

    I remember when you could fully charge your battery in under 30 seconds.

    REMOVABLE BATTERIES BITCH

  • greysemanticist@lemmy.one
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    4 months ago

    How about two batteries that can be ejected and swapped without powering off the device? We don’t need to wait for super-capacitors today.

    iPhones… someday. :)

    • thefartographer@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Consider that the energy output of a 12-gauge shotgun is approximately 4500 Newton-meters and, from personal experience, can rotate a first-gen iPad at an extrapolated 240 rpm (extrapolated as this proved difficult to sustain). That gives us an equivalent of 113 kW! A modern ipad would only need about 13 kW to charge in one second.

      So, one shotgun shell could easily charge yours and 7 of your friends ipads instantaneously, although the results are difficult to appreciate.

      • noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        probably because they currently don’t get stuffed a bucketload of crackly juice* in 60 seconds

        *I don’t, in fact, know how electricity really works

        • Icalasari@fedia.io
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          4 months ago

          More like, “Shoving it in so fast it makes the sauce in the battery super heat and create a bomb”

      • Skyline969@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Been charging my phone overnight for years. Battery health is 100% and I never have to worry about charging.

        • ColdCreasent@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          Impossible for battery health to be at 100% after years. May still be working great, but not 100%.

          • boonhet@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            Battery degradation is ridiculously unpredictable. I’ve seen 100 cycle batteries at 75% and 2500 cycle batteries over 90%. I only dealt with like 5 MacBook models

              • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                Depending on what battery protection modes are in play, many have smart charging or other features designed to prolong life. Also a fair few batteries come out with greater than design capacity from the factory. It’s called a design capacity and not an absolute capacity for a reason. A phone battery that left the factory at 110% could conceivably still be at or above 100%.

                Fyi it’s not overnight charging that’s the issue either, it’s charging to 100%. What one device consider 100% varies and devices will essentially lie to you about it. 4.2V is normally considered 100% full for Lithium Cobalt Oxide batteries yet some devices push higher than this while others skirt under to pad capacity and cycle life respectively. It’s about tradeoffs.

    • taanegl@beehaw.org
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      4 months ago

      No! Now take this slave labour cobalt and partake in the market place of ideas… I said partake! *shakes fist*

  • LaggyKar@programming.dev
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    4 months ago

    Figured I’d do the math on the power required.

    In the article, they show a iPhone 15 Pro, which has a 3274 mAh battery, so let’s go with that. Assuming a 3.7 V battery and a 1 minute charging time, that’s 3274 mAh × 3.7 V / 1 min727 W.

  • Teknikal@lemm.ee
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    4 months ago

    Call me skeptical I guess but if you wanted a phone that worked as long as lithium say 5000mah using capacitors I think it would be a dozen times larger at least.

    Maybe I’ve got it wrong and supercapacitors hold more energy or something like that.