Battery Breakthrough at Urbana-Champaign

This is pretty exciting, if it works out.

A new type of battery has been developed that, its creators say, could revolutionise the way we power consumer electronics and vehicles.

The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build "microbatteries" that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful.

It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech.

 As an example of the potential power of these batteries:

"You could replace your car battery with one of our batteries and it would be 10 times smaller, or 10 times more powerful. With that in mind you could jumpstart a car with the battery in your cell phone."

I like the idea of recharging much faster – an objection I have to electric vehicles is the long recharge time. It sounds like recharging these batteries would take less time than refilling your gas tank. The weight and size of batteries for electric vehicles is another problem that these would overcome.

The difficulties that remain are overcoming safety problems (currently there are combustibility concerns) and proving that they can be manufactured in quantities. Definitely worth watching how it develops.