18-year-old’s breakthrough invention can recharge phones in seconds

[Tx4obama]

18-year-old’s breakthrough invention can recharge phones in seconds

An 18-year-old science student has made an astonishing breakthrough that will enable mobile phones and other batteries to be charged within seconds rather than the hours it takes today’s devices to power back up.

Saratoga, Calif. resident Eesha Khare made the breakthrough by creating a small supercapacitor that can fit inside a cell phone battery and enable ultra-fast electricity transfer and storage, delivering a full charge in 20-30 seconds instead of several hours.

The nano-tech device Khare created can supposedly withstand up to 100,000 charges, a 100-fold increase over current technology, and it’s flexible enough to be used in clothing or displays on any non-flat surface.

It could also one day be used in car batteries and charging stations not unlike those used by the Tesla Model S, which includes “supercharger” technology that promises to charge vehicles in 30 minutes or less.

-snip-

Full article here: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/19/18-year-olds-breakthrough-invention-can-recharge-phones-in-seconds/

Wow!

[NCLefty]

1. Does she own the rights to it?

I hope she gets a cut from whoever gets rich off of it :/

[Triana]

5. She should patent it ASAP and sue hell out of anyone

who tries without her express approval or without her getting a huge chunk of the profits.

[Xithras]

29. She'd get her ass sued off if she tried.

Discussions about the newer graphene supercapacitors (which anyone can make with a graphite pencil and an old CD player) have been making the rounds among the science journals and blogs for the past year. Their potential to power everything from cellphones to electric cars have been widely discussed.

She didn't actually create a cellphone charger. She created a graphene supercapacitor and connected an LED to it...something that there are Youtube videos of OTHER experimenters already doing. Beyond that, she (and the media) are simply speculating as to its potential applications. She didn't invent it, and she has merely cited a potential application for it that has ALREADY been cited by others, meaning that it would fail any challenge based on "obviousness".

The technology was actually invented by a guy named Richard Kaner at UCLA, and was initially announced more than a year ago in an article published by the journal Science. I give her props for bringing more attention to the technology, and am impressed that a teenager could pull off a functional implementation of a bleeding edge energy storage device like this, but she didn't actually "invent" anything.

[Whisp]

2. Incredible!

Congratulations, Khare! wow.

[Sherman A1]

3. K&R

[Xipe Totec]

4. That's about how long it takes to fill a gas tank in a car

Now we're talking.

[MurrayDelph]

7. I was thinking the same thing

I've long maintained that electric cars may supplement the gas-engine ones, but will never truly replace them until you can go a minimum of three hundred miles on either one charge or with a single less-than-ten-minute-recharge.

[d_r]

6. and she came in second!

wow

[NewJeffCT]

36. That is what's amazing

The guy who won was impressive, but I don't think it will have the impact of this

[sheshe2]

8. Eesha Khare~

Thank you, our future gets brighter because of you.

I keep saying, The Children are our future!

Tx

[Initech]

9. Man I wish I could come up with some cool invention like that!

[MannyGoldstein]

10. No.

Not possible, sorry. Unless maybe it has far less than 1% of the capacity of a cell phone battery.

[Logical]

12. Sounds fishy to me also...

Wouldn't this be front page headline news?

[kristopher]

17. Not fishy but unlikely to be worthy of front page

"Supercapacitors bridge the gap between capacitors and rechargeable batteries. They have the highest available capacitance values per unit volume and the greatest energy densityof all capacitors. They support up to 12.000 F/1.2 V, with capacitance values up to 10.000 times that of electrolytic capacitors.[1] While existing supercapacitors have energy densities that are approximately 10% of a conventional battery, their power density is generally 10 to 100 times as great. Power density combines energy density with the speed at which the energy can be delivered to the load. This makes charge and discharge cycles of supercapacitors much faster than batteries. Additionally, they will tolerate much more charge and discharge cycles than batteries."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

I can't speak to her specific contribution, but I suspect that like the story floating around right now about a teen developing a nuclear reactor, the "wow" factor is the age of the person who is involved in the research, not so much the research itself. Both areas are well developed research fields.

[oldhippie]

16. Killjoy!

Next I suppose you'll tell me there are no unicorns.

[progressoid]

20. Unicorns are real...

[W T F]

11. Hope she got a patent, Exxon Mobil is going to try to get hold of it and lock it up in their safe...

Before they start drowning in their own oil.

[Posteritatis]

19. Why would they care? The phone will eat the same amount/cost of energy regardless. (nt)

[KamaAina]

30. Because it could be scaled up to charge electric cars

like this sweet Tesla Model S, made right here in the good old U.S. of A. (About ten or fifteen miles north of here, in fact.)

[Hugabear]

13. Too bad we'll never see it

Corporate America will see to that

[valerief]

26. Yeah, like tires that don't go flat. Been waiting decades for that. nt

[RudynJack]

31. Why?

That makes no sense. Who benefits by making it take hours to charge a phone?

It's not like her "invention" provides free power. In fact, it'll make people likely to use MORE electricity. Why conserve your phone usage if you can recharge it almost instantly?

[Hugabear]

32. Cell phone companies selling extra batteries and chargers

N/t

[RudynJack]

34. Customers would still need chargers.

And larger batteries would still be attractive.

Charging your phone in 30 seconds would be infinitely more valuable to customers, and they'd pay a premium for it.

[silvershadow]

14. How long before it's purchased from her and shelved forever?

(Sorry to a poop.)

[jeff47]

15. Before everyone gets too excited

Supercapacitors aren't new. They've been known for quite a long time.

So why don't we use them instead of batteries? They leak. Horribly. So you charge it up and it's discharged in a few hours whether you used the device or not.

What's 'new' here is using one in a cell phone form factor....and new is in quotes because it isn't new - it's been done before, and was discarded because of the leakage problem.

[oldhippie]

18. Jeeezzz, another killjoy .....

Can't you let the folks believe for just a little while? They want to believe!

Damn physics, anyhow.

[bhikkhu]

21. I would assume the capacitor would store the charging voltage

...so the capacitor charges in seconds from a power source, then gradually transfers (bleeds off) its charge off to the battery. Which might be useful, in theory, depending on the hardware more than anything else.

Having to charge a phone battery isn't that big of a deal, so any improvement would have to be cheap and seamless.

[Egalitarian Thug]

22. That's what I was thinking as well. n/t

[BlueStreak]

27. The article is pretty vague. Obviously capacitors can charge quickly. That's what they do.

Last edited Mon May 20, 2013, 06:38 PM - Edit history (1)

The implication of the story is as you suggest that you zap the super-capacitor, and then over the next hour or so, it transfers its energy to a conventional lithium cell where it will work for 24 hours or so.

But I have some serious doubts about the most basic arithmetic here.

As others have said, this doesn't sound like a breakthrough at all, unless the arithmetic works out such that the capacitor will retain the energy long enough to charge the battery, and doesn't require a doubling of size (and cost) of the device.

None of those rather obvious questions were addressed, so I'd say this is just another case of a "whiz kid" doing something better than prostitution or drugs, and therefore winning an award by default.

[jmowreader]

23. There's also a safety of use issue

Capacitors can completely discharge in the blink of an eye. If the battery is sitting in your hand when it happens, watch out!

[sodom]

24. thats not much of a breakthrough

The super capacitor charges the battery...how long does it take to charge the super capacitor?

[Heywood J]

25. Except that the laws of physics still apply.

Assuming you could transfer all of a battery's charge capacity in seconds, the notion that "energy = power x time" still applies. You may have already seen how hot AA batteries get in the 15-minute chargers. I wouldn't be eager to throw a phone in my pocket after that. You would also completely do away with the convenience of being able to charge the phone via USB and be back to every device having separate, bulky charging adaptors.

Seems like it would be easier to carry a spare USB cable and charge the phone more often or buy a second battery on the Internet.

[snooper2]

28. replies in this thread crack me up "The Man is going to Stomp Her Down!"

people believe everything they read...try an AC/DC theory class

[Hugabear]

33. Why are we still getting crappy gas mileage?

People have developed cars that get incredible mileage, yet we're still stuck with crappy mileage

[olddots]

35. tryed to get to the bottom of this story

not much luck but I'm a klutz anybody get some real info on this because "news " is iffy now a days .