Stem in Current Events Information Technology

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Engineering and Information Technology

micro-supercapacitors by using lasers to burn electrodes into sheets of plastic.While too expensive to bring to market at this point, the resulting product could charge 50 times as fast as current batteries. Battery engineering is also moving towards nontraditional power sources. Scientists at Stanford University have developed an aluminumgraphite battery that can reach full charge in just one minute. The company Prieto has developed a battery made out of a copper foam substrate . The batteries are safer, since there are no flammable components, they are fast-charging, and they carry five times the power density of the typical lithium-ion battery. They are also cheap to manu- facture. Meredith Perry invented the uBeam, which can charge your cell phone over the air. The uBeam transmits ultrasound waves emitted from a five-millimeter plate through the air to your smartphone, which captures the beam and transfers it to usable electricity to charge its battery. Engineers are working on even more fantastic ways to charge batteries rapidly and cheaply. Current experimental designs have been powered by radio waves, dew, sand, salt, hydrogen, solar energy, and even urine. But that’s not all. The future of smartphone battery technology may be having no battery at all. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have found a way to harness the power of sound to charge a smartphone. The scientists built a device covered with “nanogenerators” that collect sound vibrations and turn them into electrical currents. In experiments, the developers learned that traffic noise, music, and even human voices could trigger the electrical current in the phone, providing up to five volts of power.