Look Out, Energizer Bunny! New Microbatteries Pack a Powerful Punch

These batteries may be tiny, but they're also extremely powerful. The strongest on the planet, microbatteries have enough juice to jump-start a dead car battery before recharging a phone instantly. The new batteries could potentially lead a new wave of electronics development and lend aid to sustainable energy.

First developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the microbatteries can actually out-power even the best supercapacitors and could be used in radio communications and compact electronics.

The microbatteries are only a few millimeters in size, so how in the world are they so powerful? It turns out that they owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries in general have two key components--the anode (the minus side on a battery) and the cathode (plus side). By using a novel fast-charging cathode design, the researchers were able to develop a matching fast-charging anode side. They then created a way to integrate the two components at the microscale. This, in turn, created a tiny battery that packs a punch.

Usually, batteries sacrifice power for a smaller size, or vice versa. These new batteries, though, could have huge applications in smaller electronics that need large reservoirs of power.

"Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery--until now," said William P. King, the lead researcher, in a press release. "Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick and it's connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now, the battery is also tiny."

Currently, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components. They're also focusing on manufacturing them at a low cost--something that will be crucial if these batteries are to ever enter mainstream electronics production.

"It's a new enabling technology," said James Pikul, graduate student and first author of the paper, in a press release. "It's not a progressive improvement over previous technologies; it breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources. It's allowing us to do different, new things."

The details of the new battery are published in the journal Nature Communications.