Charing Ahead

With so many of the world’s leading phone and laptop manufacturers being hit with problems of exploding devices, Sara Yirrell explores a new kid on the block looking to cause astir in the rechargeable battery space.

- Sara Yirrell

The horror stories are easy to find online with a quick search, and are regularly covered in the papers. Simply type ‘exploding battery’ into a search engine and any number of articles showing the blackened shells of smartphones, tablets or laptops will appear. 

It is a problem that has hung over many of the main manufacturers in recent years, none more so than Samsung, which was forced to permanently scrap production of its Note 7 phablet, after a number of its replacement handsets (issued for the same reason) overheated and burst into flames (see ‘Flaming nightmares’, page 120).

But the other scourge of modern life is the constant battery anxiety syndrome. Batteries on personal devices appear to lose charge at an alarming pace, and the time it takes to recharge a flat battery seems to outweigh the amount of time the device actually runs for.

However a team of scientists from Oxford University, in partnership with technology firm Zap&Go, have been working to address both these problems simultaneously. They have been developing new carbon-ion batteries, which are faster charging and will not overheat.

The team, which has been working on the project since 2013, debuted their products at the CES extravaganza in Las Vegas held in early January, describing the technology as the first with the potential to combine the fast-charging characteristics of a super capacitor with the performance of a lithium-ion battery.