The first 100% automatic charging battery for a smartphone

Researchers have created a self-charging battery that can harvest and store energy using light to keep your phone constantly charged.

Yes, there are portable solar chargers, but they are very difficult to miniaturize due to complex circuit and packaging issues. To solve this problem, researchers are working on a single device capable of harvesting and storing energy using light – in other words, a self-charging battery.

The technology is developed by researchers from McGill University in Quebec and Hydro-Quebec. Professor George Demopoulous, who worked on the study, said.

'With smart phones now, you can basically carry your whole office in that device, they are loaded with all sorts of applications so you need a lot of power to use it everyday and sometimes, you don't have access to a plug to recharge .'

In the study, the researchers demonstrated that a standard cathode in a lithium-ion battery can be sensitized to light by incorporating light-harvesting molecules.

In other words, our research team was able to simulate a charging process using light as a source of energy.

The team will now have to build an anode – the storage component – ​​to close the circuit of the device.
This would allow the energy produced by the cathode to be transferred and stored. If they succeed, they will have built the world's first 100% automatic charging lithium-ion battery.

'Theoretically speaking, our goal is to develop a new hybrid solar-battery system, but depending on the power it can generate when we miniaturise it, we can imagine applications for portable devices such as phones.'

However, the researchers say that the completion of the second phase of the project could take several years, so we will have to wait.