Our company will produce thermal management products that can externally regulate the temperature of mobile devices, such as phones, tablets and small laptops powered by rechargeable batteries.
The charge capacity and performance of the batteries inevitably degrades with every charge cycle, but the decline accelerates substantially with poor temperature regulation. Our systems, based on all-solid-state thermoelectric heat pumps, will slow the degradation (mostly) by cooling the battery during charging and operation. In very cold (sub-zero) environments, the thermoelectric devices can be operated in reverse to heat the battery to maintain normal operating levels.
Improved thermal management will reduce or postpone the need for the customer to carry around a power bank later in the mobile device's product life, and will slow down the rate at which rechargeable battery materials need to be processed as waste chemicals, which is a huge and growing environmental headache.
The company will target the mobile IT devices sector in Hong Kong first, but overseas marketing is a logical progression. Technical lessons learned in addressing these markets may also be useful in later product iterations, beyond the company startup phase: e.g. thermal regulation of larger electric vehicle batteries. However, the company will initially focus on batteries for mobile devices.
Team members
Dr Stephen Vincent Kershaw (Research Associate, Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering, CityU)
* Person-in-charge
(Info based on the team's application form)
- CityU HK Tech 300 Seed Fund (2022)