Transparent Batteries Help Mobile Devices Go See-Through

Just as telephones have evolved from booths to mobiles and televisions from boxes to flat screens, now batteries can be so inconspicuous that one can see right through them.

Scientists have now invented clear, flexible batteries that, when sandwiched together with similarly transparent touch screens, video displays, microchips and solar cells, might help lead to entirely see-through mobile devices. For instance, you might imagine tablet computers with clear bodies that can superimpose images onto whatever you see through them for augmented reality applications.

The new invention is a cutting edge type of lithium-ion battery, the kind now popular in consumer electronics because of how much power it stores. The key to making such a battery appear transparent involved miniaturizing its opaque parts until they are too small to be seen with the naked eye, then spreading them apart so they only cover a small portion of a see-through backing.

First researchers at Stanford University created a flexible silicone rubber membrane with a grid of trenches each 35 microns, or millionths of a meter wide patterned onto it. In comparison, the human eye can only make out details 50 to 100 microns in size.

The scientists then filled the trenches with a water-based slurry that contains lithium-ion battery materials. Electric current moves from trenches of lithium titanate spinel, which form the negative electrode, across a gel to trenches of lithium manganese oxide, which make up the positive electrode. A gold film deposited onto this silicone rubber helps collect this electric current to power electronics.

These transparent batteries open up exciting opportunities for transparent elections such as laptops, cellphones, iPads and tablets.

The more batteries there are stacked atop each other, the more energy they store collectively, but the less transparent they are overall. But researchers are working on the battery’s structure, such as making the trenches deeper and the silicone rubber layer thinner, thus bumping up the energy storage capacity.

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