“30-Second Cellphone Charge” Not Here Yet

A California teenager has attracted widespread media attention after creating a “supercapacitor” that could recharge a cellphone battery in under 30 seconds. But much of the coverage appears to have downplayed the word “could.”

18-year-old Esha Khare (pictured above left) won an Intel Young Scientist Award of $50,000 at the company’s International Science and Engineering Fair. She actually shared the honors with two other teens, American Henry Lin (right) who created a simulation of galaxy clusters and Romanian Ionut Budisteanu (center) who took the top prize of $75,000 for designing an autonomous car control system that would only cost around $4,000.

The full details of Khare’s development have been thin on the ground to say the least. What was revealed was that her device, which appears to be a couple centimeters long and a few millimeters thick, is flexible enough that it could be built into fabric. Khare also says it could work for around 10,000 recharge cycles, far more than existing cellphone batteries.

However, there’s no sign it’s ready for use right now.  As carefully written headlines downplay (and some less-carefully written piece omit altogether), Khare merely explained that she’s been able to charge the device in 20 seconds and successfully test that it emits enough power to light a LED. She’s not made any public displays of it powering a cellphone and indeed doesn’t appear to have publicly claimed to have reached that point yet.

Whatever the timescale, she certainly seems to have attracted attention. Google has reportedly already been in touch with her about the project. There’s also a suggestion that Khare’s work could eventually be used to cut charging time on electric vehicles.