A Transparent Phone? Clear Batteries Could Make It Happen

Could Tony Stark's transparent phone from Iron Man 2 become real? It just took a major step forward thanks to researchers who have discovered a way to make batteries transparent.
Some existing phones, like the LG GD900, have transparent parts, but so far no one's created one with a completely see-through body. Part of the problem is that the electrodes in the typical lithium-ion batteries found in today's gadgets aren't transparent. Researchers at Stanford University confronted that issue by building a battery with electrodes that aren't completely solid, instead made up of a grid-like mesh. The thickness of the individual strands in the mesh is below the resolution of the human eye, making them virtually invisible.
The researchers were able to create the mesh by coating a silicon substrate with nanoscale trenches, each one just 35 microns wide. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.) Then they filled the trenches with the electrode material, a modified version of an existing gel electrolyte.


The result: a battery that you can see through. Besides being transparent, the battery is also flexible, meaning it could be built into things like wristwatch straps, and could make for an excellent pairing with already-flexible OLED screens.
There is one serious limitation, however, at least in the prototype the researchers created: it only holds about half the energy of a lithium-ion battery the same size. But the people behind the new tech say it's comparable with nickel-cadmium battery technology, and they have hopes that advances in materials science will improve the energy density, assuming someone invests in the technology.
So when will we see the Iron Man phone? Probably not for a few years, since new technologies like this typically face a long road from lab to production. But one of the researchers thinks the cool factor of a transparent gadget may put the tech on the fast track.
"It just looks cool," Yi Cui, the leader of the research team, told the Stanford News Service. "I want to talk to Steve Jobs about this. I want a transparent iPhone!" 

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