If you’re looking to make a device that bends, folds, or can be rolled up, it’s important that the battery be able to do this too.
A recently published Apple patent, entitled “Flexible battery structure,” highlights how to power a foldable display, and also seems to be looking to fix a recurring issue with similar devices.
“Batteries often take up a substantial amount of space in a portable electronic device,” it explains. “As devices have grown increasingly more power hungry, greater amounts of space need to be dedicated to accommodate space for the batteries.”
“In addition to taking up space, the batteries are also often quite rigid, often making placement of the batteries in portions of a device designed to bend impractical,” it continues. “When the battery is rigid and unable to withstand substantial amounts of bending, the substantial portion of the device that surrounds the battery is also unable to bend.”
Apple’s proposals seem to center on working with battery cells and the connections between them.
“One solution… is to separate the flexible battery cells into discrete regions,” it says.
“For example, the flexible battery cells can be rolled up into discrete cylinders and then distributed across a flexible substrate,” it continues. “Depending on the interval between the discrete cylinders and diameter of the discrete cylinders, the resulting battery can be flex about at least one axis.”
A fair amount of the patent discusses different methods of mounting or stacking battery cells, as well as how to alleviate the stress this causes on the battery material.
One core idea discusses how to essentially distribute the battery along the surface area of the device’s display:
“[The] flexible battery can be distributed along all four sides of [a] flexible display,” it says. “For example, [the battery management unit] BMU and main logic board could both be packaged within a housing into which… is configured to retract by a retraction mechanism that results in flexible display being wound around a cylindrical member.”
The patent is credited to exclusively Jiang Ai, who is also listed on the team responsible for a previous patent concerning a folding iPhone display with a more robust bend radius.
Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.
Via AppleInsider and the United States Patent and Trademark Office