Battery invented by teen could charge cellphone in seconds

Running out of juice for your mobile device has to be one of the biggest problems that smartphone and tablet users face during their day. Now, a California teen has come up with a way to save you from a dead phone in just 20 seconds flat.

Eesha Khare, an 18-year-old high school student has put her impressive chemistry knowledge to work by inventing an energy storage device that can charge a cell phone in 20 to 30 seconds, NBC News reports.

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Khare says that her cellphone battery always dies, which led her to work on the supercapacitor. The device, which lets you store lots of energy in a tiny space and hold it for a long time, has about ten times the number of charge cycles than a conventional rechargeable battery.

Khare’s invention was part of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Arizona last week, where she took home the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and $50,000. Along with Khare, Henry Wanjune Lin was recognized for his work in astrophysics simulating thousands of cluster galaxies, while the top prize of the evening went to Ionut Alexandru Budisteanu, who used artificial intelligence to create a low-cost, self-driving car.

To demonstrate her device, Khare powered a LED at the fair, but told CNET that she sees the possibility of it being used in smartphones, portable electronics and potentially even car batteries.

For those who are interested in the science behind Khare’s device, she wrote this explanation: "To improve supercapacitor energy density, I designed, synthesized, and characterized a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogenated TiO2 (H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell." For those of you who, like me, didn’t get past Grade 10 science, it basically translates into “I made a better supercapacitor.”

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Khare’s invention comes just a month after a group of researchers announced they had come up with a “super battery.” The University of Illinois researchers say that their new microbattery, which uses a three-dimensional internal structure, allows the battery to charge 1000 times faster than a traditional rechargeable battery, which could mean charging a super-thin phone in less than a second.

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