Samsung's ‘graphene balls’ tech may help your phone charge faster and last longer

Graphene, the honeycomb structure of carbon atoms, is the gift that just keeps on giving. From claims that it will make phone screens better, to making prosthetic limbs stronger, and even potentially curing blindness.

But now, Samsung is developing a battery that uses graphene to improve on the speed with which it can charge, and its capacity.

What’s quite staggering is the amount of improvement that is being promised by the paper published in scientific journal Nature: the lithium ion battery with graphene coated elements is able to charge up to five times faster than a standard battery, and have a capacity increased by up to 45%.

In it for the long-haul

This would be a massive boon to smartphone owners, who long for a day that their phones could charge in minutes and last (fingers crossed) more than a day on a single charge.

But it wouldn’t only be smartphones that would benefit. In the paper, it explicitly mentions the needs of electric vehicles. With countries all over the world imposing deadlines by which all vehicles sold have to be electric, the ability to charge a battery quickly is moving from a want to a need with some pace.

At present, charging an electric vehicle can take an hour or more, which is obviously a massive step-down in efficiency from filling a tank of gas which takes a matter of minutes.

At the moment this technology is still in an experimental stage, so don’t expect it in your Samsung Galaxy S9, but it is exciting to see such a major name putting the time and money into this technology as it means it’s more likely to actually see the light of day.