Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Mobile
  3. News

Great balls of graphene: New Samsung tech could charge phones five times faster

Andy Boxall
By

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 how does fast charging work
Samsung’s Advanced Institute of Technology has come up with another use for graphene, a material that’s part of many exciting future projects from purifying seawater to detecting cancer, this time putting it to work inside lithium-ion batteries. Scientists created a “graphene ball” coating for use inside a regular li-ion cell, which has the effect of increasing the overall capacity by up to 45 percent and speeding up charging by five times.

Any smartphone owner will know the pain of waiting for a battery to charge up, especially when time is of the essence, and even though we have effective proprietary tech available to use like OnePlus’s Dash Charge and Huawei’s SuperCharge, the recharge times never dip below an hour. If a graphene ball can speed things up in the manner suggested by the research team, that will all change.

Related Videos

If your phone charges up in 90 minutes now, that number will tumble to just 18 minutes if the cell inside has been given a graphene ball boost. What’s more, this doesn’t seem to affect the cell’s lifespan, with the team claiming that after 500 cycles, the enhanced battery still had a 78 percent charge retention. The graphene coating improves the stability and conductivity of the battery’s cathode and electrode, so it’s able to take the rigors of fast charging with fewer downsides.

Related

Samsung’s research team has published a long, very technical paper about how the graphene ball works, and how it’s produced. It’s clear the technology is at the very early stages, and isn’t likely to be a major feature on the Galaxy S9 (or the iPhone 11 or any other device next year), but its potential to have an impact on future batteries inside Samsung and other phones is obvious. Who doesn’t want a faster charging, longer-lasting battery inside their favorite device?

Li-ion batteries power not only our mobile gadgets, where fast charging is a extremely helpful, but they are also used in electric vehicles, where fast charging is essential for wider adoption. Samsung says it’s possible the graphene ball technology can be scaled up from small capacity cells in our phones, to much larger batteries inside cars. The company has filed patents in the United States and South Korea for graphene ball technology, but there is no indication when or if it will reach a consumer product.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
The entire Beats headphone and earbuds range is discounted right now
Beats

Amazon is slashing prices on every single style and model of the Beats headphone line. From Buds to Powerbeats to over-the-ear headphone, every style is on sale. That's not to say that every color is discounted though. Check out all the headphone deals options below and grab the Beats you've always wanted.
Beats Studio Buds -- $120, was $150

The Beats Studio Buds offer the core essentials you could need from earbuds you might wish to take to the gym or use while on a run. They have a custom acoustic platform that promises powerful and balanced sound. More importantly for outdoor use, there are two distinct listening modes -- Active Noise Cancelling for blocking out all environmental sounds along with a Transparency mode for when you do need to interact with the world once more. It's ideal for those times when you want to zone out at the gym before remembering you need to speak to someone once in a while. There's up to eight hours of listening time with up to 24 hours when you combine the charging case. The earphones are also IPX4-rated for sweat and water resistance.

Read more
Need a great charger for $100? I may have found the perfect one
Voltme Revo 140 GaN charger in black color with a green Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra against a white background.

Mobile phone companies have divided views on the topic of including a charger in the box. For consumers, choosing sides in this debate has been relatively effortless. While the act has univocally annoyed buyers — and swelled Apple’s revenue by over $6 billion — it has also led to a boom in multi-port chargers that make for a superior choice over multiple chargers.

As an act of rebellion, I have turned to using multi-port bricks that can also charge my MacBook along with most of the phones I use or review, and GaN chargers have served me well over time.

Read more
The 15 most important smartphones that changed the world forever
Huawei P30 Pro and P30

If there’s any piece of technology that has made a significant impact on the lives of everyone, it’s the cellular phone —  specifically, the smartphone. It’s literally a tiny computer that fits into your pocket, and brings a plethora of information, entertainment, and lets you capture visual memories or be productive wherever you go. Pretty much everyone has a smartphone these days, for better or for worse.

But have you ever thought about which smartphones have been the most important and influential ones that shaped the rest of the industry? Let’s take a look at what we consider to be the most important smartphones of all time.
iPhone (2007)

Read more