Smartphones and tablets are going to get even better batteries in the future, and one company apparently has a different take on batteries rather than sticking with lithium-ion technology. Paper Battery has its own ultracapacitor batteries, which look promising enough to have earned the company $3 million in funding from Caerus Ventures to further develop its patented technology.
Ultracapcitors store energy in an electric field, VentureBeat reports, and are much smaller than traditional lithium-ion batteries. Ultracapacitors can deliver large burst of energy, the publication notes, but they offer less power per charge than regular batteries.
Paper Battery has one such thin ultracapacitor that can be used as a standalone battery or can be wrapped around lithium-ion batteries to improve battery life.
“Paper Battery’s ultracapacitors can dramatically increase the battery life, thermal efficiency, and signal effectiveness of electronics devices such as smartphones, tablets, wearables, remote servers, and Internet-of-things products while also reducing the bill of materials cost,” the company says.
The PowerPatch battery is apparently the company’s only listed product and measures just 0.4mm thin. The battery could be used for “cloud computing and mobile applications such as wearable electronics and smartphones and tablets,” and the newly raised funds will apparently be used exactly to create batteries for such devices. The first commercial PowerPatch batteries should be available next year.
The company also says that the ultracapacitor technology it uses is eco-friendly, as the battery is composed of “high surface area activated carbon, carbon nanotubes or graphene,” while “paper or other porous polymer separators” can hold the electrolyte and separate electrodes.
A mysterious “potential large company in consumer electronics,” may make use of the technology in future products. The company revealed that in the past eight months it “signed a test and evaluation contract with one of the largest OEM manufacturers in consumer electronics,” without mentioning its name.
