Pretty much everyone has a smartphone these days, and quite a few people are annoyed by the battery life on those phones. We often mention battery life as the main problem in today’s smartphones, and battery tech itself might be to blame here. Batteries haven’t really evolved as SoC’s, cameras and other smartphone components have. Sure, we have fast charging technology these days and what not, but the batteries themselves are almost the same as they were before. Companies have optimized SoCs to be power efficient, they’ve also optimized software and what not, and all with the purpose of saving battery life.
We’ve seen a ton of battery patents in the past, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. Well, a company called Oakridge Global Energy Solutions is looking to introduce the next-gen battery units. The company is actually aiming to introduce solid-state batteries, and are looking to basically replace lithium-ion batteries in a long run. The lithium-ion batteries have been commercialized back in 1991, and the company feels it’s time for a change. The solid state lithium ion batteries can be considered an improvement over regular lithium ion batteries, at least according to Oakridge Global Energy Solutions.
So, what are solid-state batteries? Well, in these batteries both the electrodes and the electrolyte are solid-state. This is an advantage in many ways, the solid state electrolyte serves as a separator, so it makes everything much safer. Solid state electrolytes actually allow scaling due to the elimination of certain components, so they could be made with a higher energy / power density. Toyota has actually started developing solid-state batteries back in 2010, and event hough they’re making progress, the results are expected in 8 years.
Now, the Oakridge Global Energy Solutions are targetting IoT (Internet of Things) markets, and are hoping to make serious progress moving forward. There’s plenty more info available online, if you follow the source link below, you’ll be redirected to ‘Advanced and Post Lithium-ion Batteries 2016-2026: Technologies, Markets, Forecasts’, an article compiled by IDTechEx which should give you plenty of additional information on the subject. That is pretty much it, we’ll see what happens next, but one thing is for sure, we need some serious technological improvements as far as batteries are concerned.