A large company based out of California called Qnovo recently said they have a new way of rapidly recharging lithium-ion batteries. With their new technology, your phone can get 6 hours of battery life in just 15 minutes of charging. Compared to 1-2 hours of charging from normal phones. That’s pretty incredible if you ask me.
As most of you readers may know, lithium-ion batteries that are in your phone, tablet, or laptop holds less charge as time passes on. There are several reasons why the LIBs lose charge extremely fast but one of the most causes is the creation of dendrites. It is lithium that finds ways to leak out of the anode while your device is charging. These dendrites can reach out and locate the electrolyte and cause it to short circuit, which can kill the battery life.
You should be aware that charging a lithium-ion battery can be dangerous because of dendrite formation. So to make sure they do not form, the amounts of current that are going through the battery are being reduced. Yes, it will give you long battery life, BUT that just means you will have long charging times.
The company Qnovo is offering a solution to this. So instead of reducing the charging current to the LCD so that won’t damage the battery, Qnovo has created a smart feedback loop that checks upon the battery’s status very frequently to make sure that it gets the right amount of current. By sending a pulse signal to the battery, Qnovo can find out the battery’s temperature, age, and other charging issues. By monitoring the battery throughout the charging process, it can be tweaked. The Qnovo website even points out that this just doesn’t help the batteries of all different ages. Even if it was two batteries that were made in the same day from the same factory, they could act differently.
So in conclusion, Qnovo is around three to six times faster charging and is apparently healthier for your battery in general. The company is offering two solutions. Software on your phone/laptop that increases your charging speed, or a small chip that manages your device’s charging circuity. The chip may be more effective of course, but its a lot easier for users to simply install software on their device rather than inserting a chip into their circuit board.
But if Qnovo can somehow focus on the piece of software only rather than the chip, then this company can be leading on to something extremely big. While most devices are restricted by total battery capacity, the faster charging solution would definitely give mobile computing another big boost, even though it may not need one.
According to Qnovo, they told several sources that you could see their new technology being released on “some smartphones” somewhere in the year of 2015. If Qnovo stays up to its promises, this will be one of the next big things for all mobile phone users. This idea will be like landing a gold mine.
