Huawei has filed a trademark application for a new technology called “SuperCharge,” which could be the branding given to their new high performance charging solution. This is something Huawei demonstrated in the final weeks of 2015 and it’s notable for two reasons. The first is that the technology was able to recharge a 3,000 mAh battery to approximately 50% in only five minutes and the second is that Huawei’s technology purports to not damage the battery, which some other fast charging solutions may do.
Fast charging has become more important for 2015 and 2016 because as smartphones have acquired larger and higher capacity batteries, this means that potentially customers would have to leave their device on the charger for several hours, effectively overnight, in order to fully recharge the device. Recharging a 3,500 mAh battery with a 5.0V, 0.5A USB charger plug is an exercise in patience but even using a 2.1A USB charger, it still takes a long time. There are many competing fast charging technologies introduced by chipset or device manufacturers including Dash Charge. These technologies are based on increasing the voltage and current provided to the smartphone (or tablet) in order to accelerate the charge, as the higher the current the battery is able to accept, the quicker the energy tank is topped up. However, the faster a battery is recharged, the greater the heat produced by the process and heat is very much an enemy of batteries. Huawei’s high performance recharging process uses a different technique involving bonding hectometers to graphite molecules and using these as a catalyst “for the capture and transmission of lithium through carbon bonds.” When Huawei’s new battery charging story broke in November, the company said that it could see these new batteries commercially available in September 2016.
A newer battery technology designed for rapid charging should be good news for the industry, given that the most common complaint from smartphone owners is that battery life is not great. Most manufacturers appear to design most smartphones to provide most users with a typical day of use, but of course designing for the average means that a large number of people find that their device runs out of power at lunch, or perhaps in the middle of the afternoon or in early evening when they arrive home. The ability to add a meaningful battery charge to a device in a relatively short space of time is a very welcome feature for the busy smartphone owner.