Invisible iPhones Imminent

Published on Tuesday, 09 August 2011 08:37

By Benedict Gifford.

"I want to talk to Steve Jobs about this!”

Who hasn’t bellowed something like this at the moon?  The difference in Yi Cui’s case is that he and his team of scientists at Stanford University were shouting it shortly after inventing a transparent and flexible lithium-ion battery.  They have honest call to see the man.  You were just drunk.  Yes you were.

The transparent battery is being heralded as the breakthrough piece-in-the-puzzle of see-though, flexible everything – transparent telephone, transparent mp3, transparent camera and etc.

It has to be seen to be believed

At the moment we have to settle for transparent keyboards and other undemanding paraphernalia - the battery proving the stumbling block in making anything invisible that requires any degree of juice.  The problem that made scientists despair of ever making the lithium-ion battery disappear is that it's metal components are stubbornly opaque.  

Yi Cui and his student Yuan Yang got around this problem by bonding microscopic pieces of these still-opaque metals to a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) grid, making the materials so small as to be invisible (the grid clocks in at 35 microns, well below the 50-100 micron resolving power of the human eye).

A solution containing miniscule electrode materials is then floated between the alleys of the grid and the whole thing is sealed with an electrode gel.  The gel was developed by Yang at Stanford and acts as both electrolyte and separator, replacing the last opaque component and rendering the entire battery see-though.   And being a gel-plastic it is highly flexible, like the insole of a shoe.

There is some way to go yet – the battery currently only offers about half the power of its more visible counterpart and can’t power something as big as a laptop, but Yang hopes that the energy density of the battery will improve as materials improve.  And since the manufacture isn't overly complicated production at scale is a possibility.  Best of all the battery will not remain the preserve of the rich and childless – since many of the materials are the same as those currently in use Cui says the price ‘could be similar to those of regular batteries’.

And: alongside paving the road for some bitchingly cool, micro-light, flexible devices the new battery means that scientists can now see inside a battery as it’s working.  Not just in the way you’ve always wondered what’s going inside a Duracell – they can watch a battery’s chemical reactions in real-time - something not possible before Yang and Cui’s breakthrough.

All good news.  Though given that opaque phones are the most looseable things in the world, train lost and found offices worldwide might not agree.

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Relevant Links

Smartphones at War: Kevlar Jackets or Bullet Magnets?

Stanford University Official Website

Breakthrough Discovery Brings Rechargeable Batteries to the Next Stage of Performance