New Nanotech Could Double Your Smartphone's Battery Life

New phones' speed, screen-size and resolution, and camera sensors keep getting better and better almost on a daily basis, but the one thing that has continued to suffer is battery life. Basic handsets could last for days between charges, but if you're using a smartphone, you're almost certainly not leaving home without a charging cable.

Battery technology hasn't been able to keep up with the demands of our pocket computers, but this could change in the near future. All batteries boil down to an electrolyte, an anode and a cathode. Lithium-ion batteries use lithium as the electrolyte, but not in the anode. Lithium metal would be the optimal choice as an anode material, because it has the highest specific capacity (3860mAh g-1) and the lowest anode potential of all; however, pure lithium anodes degrade quickly, and have safety issues.

A study published in the Nature Nanotechnology journal shows a potential breakthrough that could double the capacity of lithium-ion batteries that are typically used in phones, tablets and other electronics. The paper was co-written by Yi Cui and Guangyuang Zheng of Stanford University, and in the abstract, the authors write about the need for developing batteries with higher energy storage density than existing lithium-ion batteries.

They concluded that lithium metal would be the optimal choice as an anode material, but noted that there are some serious safety concerns because it forms "mossy metal deposits".

To deal with this problem, the team used a coating of carbon nanospheres, which worked to prevent the formation of lithium dendrites. What this means is that batteries could last longer, or become smaller without losing battery life (depending on the design requirements of the device) without compromising on safety or battery life either.

For smartphones, tablets and other devices, this is obviously big news, but it is particularly relevant now as electric cars are also starting to pick up steam.