New Battery Charges Your Smartphone in Just 30 Seconds

Smartphone
Men are silhouetted against a video screen as they pose in this photo illustration taken in the central Bosnian town of Zenica. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

An Israeli company claims that it has developed a new battery which has the ability to charge a smartphone in just 30 seconds and an electric car in minutes, and could change the way we interact with portable devices and revolutionise the development of two of the world's most dynamic consumer industries.

The innovation, developed by Tel Aviv-based StoreDot and based on nanotechnology, acts as a kind of super-dense power sponge, storing a much higher amount of charge than existing technology in a staggeringly short amount of time.

The company predicts that the battery, which is at present too bulky to be used in mobile phones, will be ready in a smaller unit by 2016 for around £18 each and with a lifetime of about three years. In just 30 seconds, this slim battery will be able to absorb enough power to keep a smartphone charged for a whole day.

The radical new battery design is based on the invention of "nanodots", chemically synthesized bio-organic compounds known as peptides - short chains of amino acids - which are the building blocks of proteins. Thanks to their small size, nanodots allow batteries to absorb and retain power more effectively.

By using a wide range of naturally abundant bio-organic raw materials, the company have avoided the environmental problems caused by other nanodot technologies that are heavy metal-based, making them toxic.

Nanodots are also very cheap to manufacture due to their basic biological mechanism of self-assembly.

"These are new materials, they have never been developed before," said Doron Myersdorf, the founder and chief executive of StoreDot.

With the number of smartphone users predicted to reach 1.75 billion this year, the new battery would have a huge market and investors have seen this as an exciting opportunity.

StoreDot has raised $48 million of funding, including from a leading Asian mobile phone maker who Myersdof has declined to name. Other investors include Russian billionaire and Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich.

According to Myersdorf the technology could also be adapted to electric cars, reducing charging times from an overnight charge to one that charges in just minutes.

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