Tag: smartphone battery

Vitamin powered phone battery could lead to cheaper devices

Researchers have developed a battery that has a high voltage and will last a longer time than current tech.

Scientists have come up with a vitamin powered phone battery technology that will allow devices to last longer while giving them more voltage. Moreover, this could be an important step toward reducing the price tag of battery powered devices.

This new battery technology is not entirely unlike lithium-ion but are different in an important way.

The battery is different because it uses flavin – a component of vitamin B2 – as its cathode. The cathode is the part of the battery that stores the electricity. Then, that energy can be used once it is connected to a device. This vitamin powered phone battery provides a more natural solution to the question of how to keep devices charged.

Vitamin powered phone battery - Vitamin B molecule with mobile phone and battery chargerDwight Steferos from Canada’s University of Toronto, said “We have been looking to nature for a while to find complex molecules for use in a number of consumer electronics applications.” He added, “When you take something made by nature that is already complex, you end up spending less time making new material.”

The vitamin powered phone battery provides a very affordable way of giving mobile devices the charge they need.

This is not the first time a battery has been made with bio-derived components. However, this is the first rechargeable battery using bio-derived polymers. Polymers are long chain molecules. They are used for one of this new battery technology’s electrodes.

This technology’s key is the possibility it opens for keeping the energy stored within a vitamin-created plastic. The plastic is far less expensive than traditionally-used metals such as cobalt. The vitamin-created plastic is also more environmentally friendly and easier to process. It may play a central role in reducing our dependence on portable battery packs due to inadequate charge.

The scientists developed the material from vitamin B2. They sourced the vitamin from genetically-modified fungi. They used a semi-synthetic process for polymer preparation. It linked a long-chain molecule with two flavin units.

The result is a vitamin-powered phone battery that is environmentally friendly with a high voltage and with a high capacity. These and the rest of the findings from the researchers were published in the Advanced Functional Materials journal.

Will a smartphone battery charge itself one day?

A growing number of reports are indicating that companies – including Motorola Solutions – are working on it.

Because of the broad scale dependence that much of the population has on their mobile devices, when a smartphone battery dies, it can cause people to experience anything from a slight frustration to a large amount of panic.

Companies are now starting to come up with new strategies to make sure mobile device batteries stay charged.

While a considerable amount of this effort is being focused on developing a slimmer, lighter and more powerful smartphone battery, others are working on the challenge of creating devices that don’t need as much power in order to run all the features a user wants for his or her everyday life. Consumers, themselves, have been doing what they can to get the most battery life from their devices, including dumping power draining apps and bloat-ware, when they can, and reducing certain activities – such as streaming video – when they’re on their last bar of battery.

However, some efforts are now focusing on unique strategies such as a self-charging smartphone battery.

Smartphone Battery - Self-ChargeWhile there may be more than one company working on such an effort, Motorola Solutions has found itself in the spotlight for just this reason. At the time of the writing of this article, the claims have only been as official as a rumor, but they are starting to appear in a growing number of places and are pointing to the company’s efforts with increasing detail. It is important to note that it is Motorola Solutions and not Motorola Mobility that has been identified as a part of this development.

Motorola Solutions is the result of a 2011 division of Motorola (the other half being Motorola Mobility). The Mobility side is the Moto and Droid side of the business and is also behind the Moto 360 wearable technology. On the other hand, the Solutions side of the company provides public safety equipment (such as police scanners and radios) and network solutions. Essentially, Mobility is the consumer electronics side, while Solutions is the public side. Solutions, unlike Mobility, was not sold to Google and then Lenovo as was the case with Mobility.

While this type of automatically recharging smartphone battery may seem to have appeal, it is still in a rumor phase and is far from the market. Until then, we will need to continue with careful power saving strategies and good quality external battery charger products.