Hemp has been used in the production of many things from T-Shirts to paper and even lotion for your skin. The possibilities for the uses of Hemp can be virtually endless, as it serves as a viable replacement for many different materials for lots of different things. We bet you never expected there to be any use for Hemp within the world of smartphones though. We didn’t either, but apparently there might be some ways for Hemp to be used inside of future battery technology, which sounds weird but it also really isn’t that surprising. Smartphones have transitioned beautifully over the last few years and we have started to see a trend of manufacturers trying to make smartphones look and feel more natural, and this includes using more natural materials.
OnePlus did something like this that was completely out of the ordinary by using cashew dust to coat the backs of their devices, which sounded odd just a couple months back but plenty of people have claimed that the phone feels nice in the hand and is actually quite comfortable to hold, no doubt a result helped along by the coating of cashew dust. While the feeling of the phone is important, how long the phone will last is easily a more important factor. This means that the phone has to have good battery life, and to do that it will need a good battery. Good batteries are limited by the technology we have at our disposal though, which is why researchers have been looking for alternatives to the lithium-Ion batteries that we have in our smartphones now.
Graphene and Lithium -Ion Electrodes have so far been the two alternative that researchers have been interested in, recently though an engineering professor from Clarkson University named David Mitlin, had looked to industrial hemp fibers as a possible solution. After heating up the hemp fibers at a meeting of the American Chemical Society they found that it was capable to produce super capacitors that could store just as much if not more energy as graphene. Hemp powered batteries in side of smartphones are definitely a possibility in the future, and the batteries would be much more efficient than what is being used now. Mitlin points out that while using Hemp would only be a little more powerful than using graphene, it would be 1,000 times cheaper to produce which makes it that much more impressive.