Many users might be in love with their stylish iPhones but they secretly love the idea of having transparent devices — a dream that might just as well come true soon.
The Stanford researcher, Yi Cui has now created a see through Lithium ion battery. Several electronics components, such as displays or transistors had already been made transparent, it was only the Lithium ion battery which hadn’t become transparent yet.
There are so many ways in which the electronic components may be made transparent. In one method, the component is made very thin, so the human eye does not register the object. Another method is to give it a pattern, again very small so it is not visible to human eye.
While other components of the battery could be made invisible by making the smaller, the electrodes still stood out. The idea of making the electrodes very thin isn’t nice, since thinner electrodes wouldn’t be able to store a lot of power, thus defeating the very purpose of building a battery.
To overcome this problem, Yi Cui decided to go for the second method – he built an electrode in a superfine mesh form, and this mesh was able to store a lot of power, just like normal Lithium ion batteries.
“Its cost could be similar to those of regular batteries,” said Cui while talking about the battery, adding, “Especially if we use low cost metals as current collectors, there is no reason this cannot be cheap.”
In the laboratory trials, the research team used the same battery to illuminate an LED light, and the light was easily viewable through the transparent battery. The battery design still has some inefficiencies, but the Stanford research team intends to work on these and believes the design could become commercial within two to four years.