Algorithm Charges Lithium Ion Batteries Twice As Fast

Lithium-Ion batteries power practically every major device from game devices to smartphones to computers to even cars. The University of California, San Diego, has announced that engineers from the Jacobs School of Engineering have developed a new algorithm that could potentially allow Lithium-Ion batteries to run more efficiently, reduce the manufacturing cost by 25 percent, and even charge batteries twice as fast as is currently possible.

According to the press release “this research is bringing the promise that, with advanced estimation algorithms that are based on mathematical models, batteries can be charged faster and can run more powerful electric motors…We have the unique ability to address the difficulties in estimating the battery’s state of charge heads-on, at the electrochemical level.” Further, this is not just technology that you may or may not see way down the road, “This technology is going into products that people will actually use.”

They explain how current technology works and what their new version entails:

“Lithium-ion batteries are cylindrical and made of three sheets rolled together, very much like a jelly roll. One layer is the anode, another layer acts as a separator and yet another layer is the cathode. When the battery is fully charged, the lithium ions are stored at the anode. The battery is designed so that the ions want to move from the anode to the cathode, powering the device it’s connected to in the process. To know whether the battery is functioning properly, it’s important to know where the ions are in the anode. But that’s very difficult to measure, even with sophisticated equipment. The ions are usually lodged deep inside irregularly-shaped particles within the anode. Trying to estimate the particles’ charge by measuring only the voltage on the battery is similar to having the person that collects tickets at the entrance to a movie theater try to estimate which of the seats the patrons are taking by watching the speed at which the line at the entrance is moving, Moura said. In this analogy, the ions are patrons making their way to seats within each row, which represent the particles.”

The new approach makes lithium-ion batteries more effective by using algorithms to estimate what is physically going on inside the lithium-ion battery instead of monitoring voltage and current.

While it’ll be nice to charge your smartphone or computer faster the biggest change will be to the automobile industry. Manufacturers like Tesla which produces the sports car Karma would definitely be interested in this algorithm. But you may ask, don’t batteries do better when charged more slowly; aka like through a trickle charger? This algorithm predicts where the uncharged particles are and targets them with electricity instead of wasting efficiency by flowing electricity pseudo-randomly throughout the battery.

When will this new algorithm allow us to charge our lithium-ion batteries twice as fast? No release dates are mentioned but I’m sure all the technology giants will rush to implement this algorithm.