NEC just announced the Organic Radical Battery. The battery has a thickness of only 0.3mm, is flexible, and recharges in just 30 seconds!
“Organic radical polymer assumes an electrolyte-permeated gel state, and is the reason why the rechargeable battery is so remarkably flexible and pliant. In addition, the organic radical polymer electrode reaction is extremely fast and the supporting salts migrate through gel state polymer very smoothly. This results in little resistance to the charging reaction and an incredibly fast charging time of less than 30 seconds.”
“…it is also environmentally friendly as unlike conventional rechargeable batteries, it does not contain any harmful heavy metals such as mercury, lead or cadmium.”
- NEC
Before you start dreaming of cool stuffs like a wristband phone, or music players so thin and bendable, the battery is currently only capable of 1 miliwatt hour per square centimeter. According to ComputerWorld, that is only enough to keep an embedded LED lighted for 20 minutes before requiring a recharge. The most important application of this battery is probably for active RFID tags. But nonetheless, it is great progress in the right direction.
If the Organic Radical Battery is actually capable of powering portable gadgets, what would you like to see most? Share your wacky ideas with us.
[via Akihabaranews]
December 9th, 2005 at 10:40 pm
can you say “ipod pico”? it will have 100 hour play time, and 1/2 the size of the nano! it will also be able to store ONE HUNDRED TERABYTES
December 10th, 2005 at 6:43 pm
1 mWh? so what youre sayin is this cant power pretty much anything. so whats the point? in order for it to be more powerful it would have to be bigger, and then itll probably be superceeded by normal batteries.
December 11th, 2005 at 9:03 am
u two, the whole point is that its in development… do u think the first batteries held as much as they do today?
December 11th, 2005 at 6:59 pm
Yes, Ian, yes I do.
December 12th, 2005 at 8:52 am
Hmmm…I could see possiblities, but they’ll be a lot more usefull once NEC gets them to go over 1mWh.
December 12th, 2005 at 9:01 am
Wait, that’s 1mWh/cm^2, which is a lot more than I thought it was at first. If NEC can produce them with a bit more kick per cm^2, I’ll be completely sold, especially if they end up around 4 or 5mWh/cm^2. Think, each one of the keys on your keyboard has about 1 cm^2 of surface area on top, which means that a layer of this material the size of a standard 104-key keyboard and as thick as only a guitar pick could possibly output close to 400mWh if the work-per-area-unit were as low as 3mWh/cm^2…and even then, could be molded or formed into a more usable shape.
December 12th, 2005 at 10:01 am
your laptop battery could be your keyboard too! well, eventually. that’d be real cool.
December 23rd, 2005 at 1:27 pm
Anonymouse: I hope you’re kidding.