Samsung’s revolutionary Battery Technology – The Graphene Age
Our history is defined by the materials that were controlled during the period of Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. Today, it is a little more complex as we live in the space age, the nuclear, and the information age but sooner with coming years we will be entering the graphene age too.This new material graphene has so much potential to be used in medicine, electronics, light processing, sensor technology, environmental technology and energy.
Samsung’s incredible battery technology brings us to imagine a world where mobile devices and electric vehicles can be charged five times faster than today. Cell phones, laptops, and tablets that fully charged in only 12 minutes or electric cars that fully charge at home in only an hour. Samsung is making this possible on November 28th, by announcing a new battery development made out of graphene with a five times faster charging capacity than the traditional standard lithium-ion batteries but before talking about that let us quickly go over what graphene is.
GRAPHENE’S INCREDIBLE PROPERTIES
it sounds like a super-natural material out of a comic book but graphene is real and made out of graphite which is the crystallized form of carbon and commonly found in pencils. Graphene is a single atom thick structure of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice and is a million times thinner than a human hair. The more interesting characteristic of being 200 times stronger than steel and as much as six times lighter is freaking incredible. Not only that it can stretch up to a quarter of its length and but also even harder than a diamond. Graphene can also conduct electricity faster than any known substance, 140 times faster than silicon and can also conduct heat 10 times better than copper. On top of that it is also transparent, 97% of light passes through graphene and lastly, graphene is also most impermeable material known even helium atoms can’t pass through graphene. Graphene was theorized by Phillips Wallace in 1947 and attempts to grow graphene started in the 1970s but never produced results that could be measured experimentally but then in 2004, scientists named Andre Gaim and Konstantin Nova Slav successfully isolated one atom thick flakes of graphene for the first time by repeatedly separating fragments from chunks of graphite using tape and won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 for this discovery.
PRICE OF GRAPHENE:
The price of graphene in upcoming Graphene Age has dropped at an alarming rate over the past ten years. Graphene was one of the most expensive materials on Earth in 2008 the Graphene production has grown from 12 tons in 2009 to over 390 tons in 2017, the companies were selling graphene in large quantities now. With this easier availability of graphene, the scope for more scientists discovering this amazing material is increased. This invention definitely, can be game-changing for so many aspects of our everyday lives.
The breakthrough research recently was done at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology with a collaboration of Seoul National University, School of Chemical & Biological Engineering. The researchers discovered a mechanism to synthesize graphene into a 3D form like popcorn using silicon dioxide; they call this 3D form a graphene ball which they use to coat the electrodes of the battery in this Fraphene Age.
Electrodes are the parts of the battery that allow flow of an electrical current. According to Samsung, using the graphene ball material on batteries increase their capacity by 45% and hence, increasing the charging speed by 5 times. Current lithium-ion batteries take an hour to fully charge but this will be reducing to 12 minutes with this new technology. This is really exciting because Samsung not only aims to improve batteries for mobile devices they also want to improve the electric vehicle batteries as well in upcoming Graphene Age.
Samsung has filed applications for the graphene ball technology patent in the U.S. and Korea where they will be aggressively working towards implementing this technology, commercially as soon as possible. Matter of fact, they will be opening an electric vehicle battery plant in Hungary in the second half of 2018. this will be able to produce 50,000 batteries for electric vehicles annually.
