14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts at the Stanford University, in the United States, announces the development of a new type of lithium-ion battery that is both transparent and highly-flexible. The new energy-storage device could have tremendous uses for the electronics industry, the group says.
Interestingly, the researchers managed to create these batteries at a cost comparable to the one associated with producing standard Li-ion batteries today. This means that the new devices could easily replace the old ones, if need be.
One of the applications that immediately spring to mind is creating transparent cell phones, one of the goals in the industry for quite some time. Transparent digital photo frames and cell phones with see-through keyboards already exist today.
The innovation might therefore be just what the doctor ordered for taking things a step further. Even gadgets such as e-book readers could be made transparent, for a more interesting user experience, the investigators say.
“If you want to make everything transparent, what about the battery?” explains SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory associate professor of materials science and engineering and of photon science Yi Cui, a worldwide renowned expert on batteries.
“I can make the battery more powerful, but I also want to make the battery look fancier,” Cui says, adding that Stanford graduate student Yuan Yang came up with the idea for this study.
The work is detailed in the July 25 issue of the esteemed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in a paper called “Transparent lithium-ion batteries.”
The team took a very interesting approach to constructing the new battery – experts decided to construct components that were nontransparent at a scale that would make them invisible to the unaided eye.
According to science, the smallest details the human eye can resolve are 50 to 100 microns across. “If something is smaller than 50 microns, your eyes will feel like it is transparent,” Yang explains.
“The energy density is currently lower than lithium batteries. It is comparable to nickel-cadmium batteries right now,” Yang says. “It's very exciting for doing fundamental scientific research. You can study what is happening inside batteries since they are transparent now,” Cui concludes.