Researchers create transparent and flexible lithium-ion battery

Making batteries transparent would allow scientists to more easily study what happens inside them, but they could also have a commercial use as several companies have already designed partially see-through gadgets such as mobile phones.

Researchers at Stanford University, California, used a clear silicon-based polymer as the basis for the battery and, as some of the key active materials could not be made transparent, they made the opaque components smaller than the human eye could see.

‘If something is smaller than 50 microns, your eyes will feel like it is transparent,’ said graduate student Yuan Yang, author of a paper on the research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Together with Yi Cui, an associate professor at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Yang created a mesh-like framework for the battery electrodes with each ‘line’ in the grid measuring around 35 microns in width.