SHANGHAI: Chinese scientists have successfully researched high-performance fiber batteries that can not only store energy, but also power personal electronic devices such as smartphones and watches.
Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai, eastern China, have developed a prototype of a leather and canvas bag fitted with a flexible fiber battery unlike any other. The team’s researcher, Jiang Haibo, said that such a bag can increase the charge of a mobile phone battery by 20-30 percent in half an hour.
Such technology could provide effective power for heated summer coats, the researchers said, adding that bags and clothing using fiber batteries could be wired or charged wirelessly and could later be connected to solar power. , understand the combination of energy storage and harvesting.
The Fudan team set up a pilot production line and achieved a production capacity of 300 watt hours, which is equivalent to a battery produced per hour that can charge 20 mobile phones at the same time, said Peng Huisheng, lead researcher of the study and an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
According to Peng, this fiber battery has practical applications in firefighting, disaster rescue, polar expeditions and aerospace.
Peng said the team began working with flexible fiber lithium-ion batteries in 2008 and solved the main problem in recent research: how to use a safe polymer gel electrolyte instead of the organic electrolyte commonly used in previous fiber batteries.
Replacing conventional liquid electrolytes with polymer gel electrolytes is an effective strategy to increase the flexibility of disposable batteries. However, insufficient moisture at the interface between the polymer gel electrolyte and the electrode reduces the electrochemical performance, especially when the battery is defective.
Fudan’s team was inspired by a natural phenomenon where blades and vines are joined together to form multiple electrode fibers that rotate together to form interconnected channels. The surface of each electrode fiber is decorated with mesh channels.
According to the study, published this week in the journal Nature, the monomer solution migrates into aligned channels and then into network channels to form electrolytes. The team was able to create a fiber optic lithium-ion battery several kilometers long and with high energy density that can efficiently power unmanned electrical equipment.
