​NTU Develops Ultra-fast Charging Batteries That Last 20 Years

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Singapore is only 276.5 square miles, about 27 miles long, and has five and a half million people, according to Wikipedia.  It’s an enormously productive country with an excellent education program from kindergarten on up to graduate schools.  Recently, one of those graduate programs announced an “ultra-fast charging batter[y] that can be recharged up to 70 per cent in only two minutes.” This breakthrough from Nanyang Technology University (NTU) is also claimed to have a 20-year lifespan, 10 times that of existing lithium-ion cells. Part of the new battery’s success comes from replacement of the traditional graphite anode with a new gel materal made from titanium dioxide, “an abundant, cheap and safe material found in soil. It is commonly used as a food additive or in sunscreen lotions to absorb harmful ultraviolet rays.”  Although naturally found in spherical shape, titanium dioxide was rolled into nanotubes thousands of times thinner than the diameter of a human hair by the NTU researchers. …