Samsung SDI, LG Chemicals unveil bendy batteries wrapping around wrist

Samsung SDI and LG Chemicals have showcased next-generation battery technologies for wearable devices at the “InterBattery 2015” exhibition in the COEX Convention Center in southern Seoul on Tuesday. The exhibition will run through Thursday.

Samsung SDI has unveiled “Stripe” and “Band” batteries, heralding an era of wearable batteries that can bend upon themselves and can fit around a person’s wrist or cup. The “Stripe” battery, which Samsung opened to the public for the first time, bends freely like a fiber, and can be applied in the form of necklace, hair band and T-shirts decoration. It is designed with interior and exterior materials and embedded with high-tech materials technology, and displays a 0.3-millimeter ultra-slim design.

The “Band” battery developed for smartwatches can enhance capacity by more than 50 percent when applied on existing smartwatches. It normally operates even after more than 50,000 bending tests within the curvature range of a person’s wrist circumference. At this exhibition, Samsung SDI showcased wearable applications applied with “Stripe” and “Band” batteries.

LG Chemicals has debuted a wrist band type “wire” battery at the exhibition. This uses the wire form battery LG had developed for the first time in the world in 2013. While previous flexible batteries stop at the 30 radius level, equivalent to a person’s wrist circumference, “Wire” can bend perfectly up and down, at the 15 radius level.

In June, LG Chemicals developed the world’s first “Hexagon” battery for smartphones. If this battery and bendable “wire” battery is applied on smartphones, battery capacity will double at maximum. Since the existing smartwatch capacity can be realized with just “wire” battery, various smartwatch designs will become possible.

According to global market research firms including Gartner, smartwatches will account for more than 40 percent of all consumer wrist devices next year, and approximately 100 million units will be put on the market by 2020.

jhk85@donga.com