Cable Shaped Batteries – A Review

There’s a new innovation on the battery front, an innovation that is totally unique and path-breaking. LG Chem, Korea’s premier chemical and industrial materials company, proudly unveils its latest formulation: Cable shaped batteries. In this post, we take a look at what these cable shaped batteries, the stories behind the making of the batteries and their practical uses.

What are Cable Shaped Batteries

Cable shaped batteries or “cable batteries” as they are being referred to, are special batteries that possess remarkable ductile and tensile characteristics. Cable batteries are also – amazingly – amenable enough to be bound in knots and entwined continually. As a result, they are capable of being integrated into many minute, non-standard spaces and shapes. These shapes could range from headphone wires to apparel stitching and from leather belts to jewelry pieces. Cable batteries essentially belong to the lithium-ion category. (image credit)

Their interesting back-story

How these cable batteries came to be forms an engaging account and helps in appreciating them better.

Although malleable batteries have already been in existence, the developers at LG Chem noted that these batteries existed only in sheet form. Consequently, these batteries weren’t practically useful to most users in a worthwhile commercial sense and, being sheet-shaped, did not engender a lot of power and energy. Also the sheet-shaped batteries were very susceptible to external factors.

Hence the research team burnt the midnight oil and came up with an extremely supple, circle-shaped electrode structure that entailed the same components used in standard lithium-ion battery types. This electrode structure, they discovered, was highly resilient and free from atmospheric fluctuations. Cable batteries were on their way!

The Production Process

What had started with the creation of the ingenious electrode structure soon culminated with the production of cable batteries. The manufacture process is no less absorbing.

• Tenuous nickel-laced copper threads are taken together with parts of the electrode structure and combined into a corded shape. This corded shape is subsequently enveloped around a ring-shaped bar and manipulated until a minuscule but exceptionally tough coil-like mechanism develops. This resultant mechanism forms the negatively charged terminal (or anode) of the cable battery.
• Later, the remaining parts of the electrode structure along with an aluminum strand (to serve as the cathode) are wound around the negatively charged terminal.
• Next, the developing battery is coated with lithium cobalt oxide to impart hardiness and thoroughly desiccated.
• The final step involves enabling the charging functionality of the cable battery – this is achieved by adding a liquid electrolyte to its body thereby boosting its conductivity. The cable battery is ready!

Their capabilities and practical uses

Cable batteries are a welcome addition to the technology sphere and grant immense scope for their utility, as is elucidated below:

• Cable batteries are impressive generators of energy, belying their small dimensions. In fact, an experiment showed that a 25-centimeter long cable battery could sustain a 4^th generation IPod shuffle for up to 10 hours. This registers even more commendable when one considers that the cable battery was kept in a gnarled state all along during the exercise.
• The cable batteries have massive commercial potential and can be envisaged to be used in sectors such as garments, jewelry, and entertainment – to name just a few.
• Due to their outstanding features, they could prove especially useful as auxiliary power supplies in the computer industry.

The bottom-line

It’s only a matter of time before cable shaped batteries will be here to stay, given their terrific features. And with increased energy-saving and energy-producing methods being devised, the future looks very bright indeed.

Author Bio

Travis Ramsy likes writing articles related to Technology News, Gadget Reviews and How To. He also does guest posting for buycharter.com – a site that offers savings and current information on charter tv, as well as charter.com services