Researchers develop a battery that has the consistency of toothpaste

We do not advise brushing with him, however, this technology could create new possibilities in the world of electronics.

A team of Swedish researchers has worked on a deformable electric battery, apparently similar to toothpaste, which stands out from current, solid voluminous batteries. It is capable of taking any shape and can be extended to twice its basic size. Innovation was published on April 11, 2025 in The Scientific Scientific Review.

If technology is still in your childhood, it can be useful and adapted to future generations of electronic devices, increasingly thin or small. In our current smartphones, the battery represents a quarter to a third of the total mass of the device.

The first fluid battery

How does such innovation work? First you must understand how a battery works, such as the one with a phone. In a nutshell, a battery has two components, an anode and a cathode.

When we use our phone and battery downloads, electrons contained in the anode walk to the cathode and produce electricity. On the contrary, when a phone is in charge, the electrons then in the cathode return to the anode.

The larger a battery, the more electricity can provide. Then we call the “ability” the amount of electricity that a battery can provide when completely loaded.

The fluid battery developed by the Swedish team is composed of two materials: plastic capable of conducting electricity and lignin, a natural component that is, for example, in wood. These two components would be abundant according to researchers.

The researchers managed to reproduce the behavior of an anode and a cathode with these materials, while maintaining this aspect of toothpaste. “We are the first to demonstrate that the capacity is independent of rigidity,” says Aiman ​​Rahmanindin, one of the main taxpayers to this discovery, in an article for the University of Linköping in Sweden.

The future of the “battery” of “toothpaste”

Technology wants to be a place of choice in the era of connected objects. Without a doubt, it will become useful in the connected health sector: “This includes portable medical devices such as insulin pumps, cardiac stimulators, hearing aids and various surveillance sensors,” Aiman ​​Rahmanudin specifies

The researcher also cites other areas, such as “food and environmental surveillance, communication and entertainment.” It also evokes potential use in smart clothes and textiles.

But technology is still in its development. Its components do not give it the necessary energy to feed a smartphone, for example. It would be necessary to produce a tension of 3.7V when only 0.9V can produce today.

“We will consider using other chemical compounds to increase tension, explains one of the researchers. One of the options we explore is the use of zinc or manganese, two common metals in the earth’s crust.”