Batteries play a substantial role in today’s world and without these pieces, electronic gadgets wouldn’t work. It should be noted that mobile phones, cars, gadgets are powered by Lithium-Ion batteries.
On the contrary, Lithium-Ion battery tech has its own setbacks and the price is one thing and also it gets overheated while charging rapidly. Studying all these properties and to bring in a new flexible lithium-ion battery product in the market, a team of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have designed and built in such a way that it can operate under extreme conditions including cutting, submersion, simulated ballistic impact and the most important thing is that it won’t explode or set mobile devices on fire.
The current Li-ion batteries are easily susceptible to catastrophic fire and explosion incidents— most of which arrive without any warning because they are built with flammable and combustible items.
It should be noted that Samsung Galaxy Note7 phones were banned from airlines due to this danger. Also the Navy’s restriction of e-cigarettes on ships and submarines is a direct response to the need to cut down the flammability of such devices.
“Li-ion batteries are already a constant presence in our daily lives, from our phones to our cars, and continuing to improve their safety is paramount to further advancing energy storage technology,” said Gerasopoulos, senior research scientist and principal investigator at APL. “Li-ion battery form factors have not changed much since their commercialization in the early 1990s; we still use the same cylindrical or prismatic cell types. The liquid electrolyte and required hermetic packaging have a lot to do with that.
“Our team’s efforts have generally been focused on replacing the flammable liquid with a polymer that improves safety and form factor. We are excited about where we are today. Our recent paper shows improved usability and performance of water-based flexible polymer Li-ion batteries that can be built and operated in open air.”
“The first generation of flexible batteries were not as dimensionally stable as those we are making today,” Gerasopoulos said.
With this latest benchmark reached to a greater extent, the researchers continue to work on advancements of this technology.
“Our team is continuously improving the safety and performance of flexible Li-ion batteries,” said Jeff Maranchi, the program area manager for materials science at APL. “We have already achieved further discoveries building upon this most-recently reported work that we are very excited about. We hope to transition this new research to prototyping within the year.”
