Do you suffer from battery rage? Whether it be your phone, your toothbrush or the remote control we need batteries to be charged… now!

I think everyone has experienced the panic and teeth gritting frustration of a battery dying too soon. Will science be able to ease our tension? Can we get excited about the batteries of the future?

Firstly let’s look at the best widely available battery cell, the lithium ion battery.

Lithium is the lightest metal on the periodic table, it is also one of the best metals for generating energy. The downside of the lithium ion battery is that we have to rely on other metals such as graphite and nickel to harness the energy from lithium.

These are prone to wear and don’t take full advantage of the energy potential of the lithium. With time this leads to a battery that increasingly looses charge the more you use it (think of how little your phone holds charge after six months compared to new).

To address this problem scientists in Singapore have replaced the traditional graphite anode with a titanium dioxide gel that they have cleverly formed into nanotubes.

These tubes are super-thin (about 1,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair) which makes them very efficient at making the most of the energy potential of lithium, fast. And I mean fast – the researchers suggest that their battery could go from flat to 70 per cent charged in just two minutes.

They are also thought to hold that charge ten times longer than current batteries.

The research is in its infancy but a licence has been granted to begin large scale production so it shouldn’t be too long before we start seeing them in our electrical devices.

Lithium may not be the whole story of future batteries.

One of the coolest sounding candidates are “metal-air batteries”. These power-packed cells of energy react metals such as zinc and sodium with nothing more complicated than air.

Lithium may still play a role – scientists have suggested that a lithium-air battery could be used to power an electric car for around 1,000 miles. The lithium-air batteries being tested are however a bit unpredictable so other metals that have lower energy potential but higher stability such as zinc have been used. Zinc-Air batteries are already being used in hearing aids.

Next time you feel that flat battery fury rise spare a thought for the scientists who successfully landed the space probe Philae on a comet. Talk about the mother of all battery nightmares! Within hours of the historic landing the batteries fairly promptly died. The batteries used on Philae were made right here in Oxfordshire by a company called ABSL Space Products and were supposed to be recharged by seven hours of sunlight each day. However the landing didn’t go quite to plan and Philae landed in shadow.

Luckily we did manage a few snippets of data before the nifty power cells heaved their last photon of solar energy.

  • Do you want alerts delivered straight to your phone via our WhatsApp service? Text NEWS or SPORT or NEWS AND SPORT, depending on which services you want, and your full name to 07767 417704. Save our number into your phone’s contacts as Oxford Mail WhatsApp and ensure you have WhatsApp installed.