Fast-Charging Batteries Face Long Road to Production

Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a new battery technology could reduce charging times of electronics to mere minutes or even seconds. Just a proof-of-concept right now, the tech has enormous potential in for devices and electric vehicles, but faces serious challenges before it ever sees production.

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One advantage the technology has is that it uses the same battery chemistry as today's typical nickel- and lithium-based batteries. By using an elaborate process that involves tiny, self-arranging polystyrene balls, coating, etching, and electropolishing, the researchers were able to increase how porous the batteries electrode material was to electrons—to the point where the charging rate was many orders of magnitude more a normal battery electrode.

"What we've developed is the way to change the nanostructure of a battery to dramatically increase the power density," Paul Braun, the man who led the research team, says. With such a battery, Braun says you could "charge a cellphone in 20-30 seconds, and a laptop potentially a few minutes."

The fast-fueling battery is far from the first battery to charge rapidly. A123 Systems has technology that increases battery charging by simply using different chemistry, though the increase isn't as much as with Braun's nanostructures. Also, Motorola once worked on a technology similar to Braun's, but with fuel cells.

"We were doing almost exactly the same technique," says Jerry Hallmark, director of energy system technologies at Motorola Mobility. "Doing this ball assembly is not something I can see doing in volume production. It's a pretty slow process [to make]. It's not something you'd do continunously, which is how batteries are made today."

Hallmark does see the potential in electric vehicles, however, where the time it takes to recharge a car battery is a key issue. If the charge time could be reduced to a matter of minutes, electric cars could become viable for long-distance drives. But rapid car-battery charging brings with it other problems.

"It sounds really cool, until you figure out you gotta have your own personal power plant to run that kind of current," says Hallmark. "When you're pumping gas in your car, the equivalent amount of energy [transfer] is something like 20 megawatts. To do the same thing with an electric charger, you need a huge amount of power and some way to connect it, and that's not a trivial design."

Braun realizes this, but he's hopeful existing power lines could be adapted for a such a system.

"To charge a car rapidly, you need a power source that is commensurately large," he says. The power that runs into your house is simply insufficient, but there's every reason to believe the power infrastructure could handle it."

Now that Braun's team has built prototypes, he says the next step is commercialization. He plans to create a startup and hopes to have commercial prototypes within 18 months. Hallmark has a word of caution for Braun: that it's a long road from lab to product—especially in a field that already has many players in the game.

"A lot of these startups will come up with something, but it's very unrealistic to think they're going to scale up and start building batteries in volume," says Hallmark. "Usually their strategy is to work with a big battery supplier and license to them. Historically that doesn't work very well, since a lot of the big battery suppliers are doing their own research. It's just a very tough business to be in."