Nanotube Batteries Could Power Mobiles For Months

A team of electrical engineers at Illinois University in the US are developing a new type of battery that could extend the running time of mobile phones a hundredfold.

The battery uses carbon nanotubes, which are 10,000 times thinner than a human hair, rather than traditional metal wires. According to the engineers, the energy consumption of a battery is proportional to the size of the components used to store and retrieve information, so smaller wires result in lower energy usage.

Mobiles that run and run

“The energy consumption is essentially scaled with the volume of the memory bit,” explained Feng Xiong, a graduate student on the team. Professor Eric Pop, who led the project, said the research could lead to the creation of batteries that last for weeks, or even months.

The technology could also have a wider environmental impact, due to the improvement in the efficiency of mobile phones. According to Xiong, using renewable sources of energy – such as solar or kinetic – could at last become a feasible option for charging, because less energy is required to top up the battery.

The researchers said that the scope for the new battery technology extends beyond mobile devices, and could also be used in “satellites, telecommunications equipment in remote locations, or any number of scientific and military applications” in the future.

The report has been published in the journal Science. The researchers said this is just the beginning for improving battery life, and they hope to eventually make devices 1,000 times more power efficient.

The importance of battery life

The battery life of mobile devices is increasingly becoming a distinguishing factor, as competition hots up in the market. Last month, Lenovo, Sony, Dell and HP kicked off a power-play with claims that their various laptop releases could offer battery life of between 10 and 32 hours. The workday battery-operated notebook is now a reality, it seems.

Meanwhile, the pressure is growing for tablet manufacturers to step up their game, following the launch of Apple’s iPad 2, which boasts 10 hours of battery life. Research in Motion is floundering on this front, with owners of the PlayBook only able to use the device for four hours before plugging it in.

“Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented,” said RIM Media Relations back in December.

“RIM is on track with its schedule to optimise the BlackBerry PlayBook’s battery life and looks forward to providing customers with a professional grade tablet that offers superior performance with comparable battery life.”

Researchers from the University of Maryland have also been working to improve the capacity of lithium-ion batteries. Last year it was reported that a biological virus known as the Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) could increase the surface area of electrodes in a battery, resulting in a ten-fold increase in energy capacity.