BBC Radio 4‘s Material World is a great program, presented by Quentin Cooper, full of useful information on the state of materials science (and several other things besides). But the item on polymer gel batteries during the Material World of September 1, 2011.
There seems to have been a lot of press on the subject recently, with this article on Polymer Gel batteries from The Register.
Given that the work comes from the University of Leeds, and they’ve licensed the technology to Polystor Energy Corporation (as described in the press release), it may actually come to the market in the future.
The layer of a polymer gel electrolyte sandwiched by the anode and cathode allows for the batteries to be thinner and lighter than previously (since you now don’t need sealed containers to hold the electrolyte). This means that manufacturing process can extrude a battery as a constant process.
This could even allow for the inclusion of batteries in innovative form factors, such as a thin layer at the back of a tablet, or wrapped around the surface of anything that needs power, perhaps this might make the pull-out flexible screen often envisaged in science fiction a reality.