Battery offers 30-second phone charging

A battery that can charge in under 30 seconds has been shown off at a technology conference in Tel Aviv. Israeli start-up StoreDot displayed the device – made of biological structures – at Microsoft’s Think Next Conference.

A Samsung S4 smartphone went from a dead battery to full power in 26 seconds in the demonstration.

The battery is currently only a prototype and the firm predicts it will take three years to become a commercially viable product.

In the demonstration, a battery pack the size of a cigarette packet was attached to a smartphone.

“We think we can integrate a battery into a smartphone within a year and have a commercially ready device in three years,” founder Dr Dorn Myersdorf told the BBC.

The bio-organic battery utilises tiny self-assembling nano-crystals that were first identified in research being done into Alzheimer’s disease at Tel Aviv University 10 years ago.

The nano-dots are described by StoreDot as “stable, robust spheres” that are 2.1 nanometers in diameter and made up of peptide molecules.

The technology has a range of uses, founder Dr Myersdorf said.

“Batteries are just one of the industries we can disrupt with this new material. It is new physics, new chemistry, a new approach to devices,” he said.

The team has also used the nano-crystals in memory chips which could write three times faster than traditional flash memory and as a non-toxic alternative to cadmium in screens.

Dr Myersdorf said that the batteries are likely to be 30 to 40% more expensive to manufacture compared to traditional ones and the final product will be twice as expensive than those on the market today.

But making them should be a relatively easy process.

“It is about letting nature take its course. We just need a facility that can do chemical processing,” he said.