Recently a Rzeszów based company revealed their product – a solid-state thin-film battery. One could think “Who cares, it’s just a battery”, but this invention poses a lot of benefits to the currently used Li-Ion batteries.
But what makes them so special? First of all these batteries are said to be really thin, allowing them to be used in small devices such as smartwatches or bluetooth earphones. The picture above this text is showing the thinness this battery. It could be as small as 0.1 mm and can be bent, flexed or rolled without causing damage, opening up a possibility to improve for example foldable phones or create really thin devices. This might bring up a question of how much energy they can hold, and it turns out that they are way more dense – they achieve over two times the energy density of Li-Ion batteries. Another upside is that they have a big range of operating temperature, meaning that the batteries could hold their capacity from -40°C-+170°C (If specially designed they could withstand an instantaneous temperature of even 280°C), allowing them to be used in really harsh conditions. Until now special purpose Lithium batteries could operate up to 125°C, but unlike The Batteries product, they had a limited lifespan of around 40-60 charges.
A big downside of Li-Ion batteries was that they were prone to exploding and highly flammable. This was completely mitigated as Solid-state batteries presented by The Batteries don’t use any liquids that emit gases and pose the risk of exploding. This gives the opportunity for the batteries to be soldered in without causing any damage to the battery and risking an explosion.
Small electronics could be really improved. Nowadays bluetooth earphones, smartwatches or any other really small devices fight over who has the best battery life. The Batteries batteries can be in many shapes and sizes, allowing them to fit inside any device you can imagine. To this day standard use batteries weren’t as flexible. Combining the flexibility with the energy density these batteries can be a game changer in small electronics, as they could be the most efficient in in fitting in small spaces. Charging them also turned out superior to the Li-Ion batteries, The Batteries states on their website that they could be fully charged over 6 times as quick. Even thought the charging speed is really quick, it is stated that they could live up to 10 000 charge-discharge cycles, which is 9 400 more than Li-Ion batteries.
Such a great invention surely must come at a high price. Yes, it was the case until after five years of development The Batteries found the way to reduce production costs to those of currently used batteries. Until now the price to produce a smartphone battery circulated around 1000 dollars, which was unacceptable for a regular consumer.
Basically this sounds too good to be true, everything that I wrote so far was just stated in their website, so we will have to wait until these batteries go out to the general market to draw any conclusions. If this invention finishes off successful we will have an absolute revolution.
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Like any new innovation, every breakthrough in technology, the Batteries have defects of infancy life, and high prices. Potential applications of such batteries seem to be tantalizing and worth struggling with improvement. It’s a chance for Polish inventors to take the world by storm and introduce a highly significant component for the vast majority of devices as is a battery. I will stay tuned to subsequent announcements.
Thank you for an interesting post and for introducing us to this technology! This battery indeed sounds like something that could change the game. The price of 1000$, however, doesn’t sound fun, so it is good that they found a way to reduce it. The question, though, is how much the decrease of the price was and how expensive the battery will be when they start selling it. But again, sounds very promising, so I definitely will be waiting for future news about this technology.
I really hope that technology would be developed and popularised, not only because it is Polish strap but because typical batteries are really bad in case of their life time and pollution so switching to these could be really beneficial not only because its more convenient but for the environment. Unfortunately such projects at the begging are really pricy as we can see.