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A materials company in Alameda, California has spent the last decade working to increase the energy stored in lithium-ion batteries; This is an improvement that could enable smaller gadgets and electric vehicles to have much greater range.

Sila has developed silicon-based particles that can replace graphite in anodes and trap most of the lithium ions that carry current in a battery.

Now, the company, which launched its product for the first time, provides some of the anode powder in future batteries. ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo 4.0 is a sports wearable. It’s a small device, but it’s a big step forward in the battery field, where promising lab results often don’t translate into commercial success.

“Whoop 4.0 is our Tesla RoadsterSays Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila, who as Tesla’s seventh employee helped solve some critical battery issues for the company’s first electric vehicle. “The first device on the market to truly prove this invention.”

The company’s materials increased the energy density in the fitness tracker’s battery by about 17%, with a slight help from other developments. That’s a significant gain in an area that usually stands out by a few percentage points per year.

It’s the equivalent of about four years of standard progress, “but by a big leap,” said Venkat Viswanathan, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

Sila still faces some real technical challenges, but progress is a promising sign for the potential of increasingly capable batteries to help the world move away from fossil fuels as the dangers of climate change accelerate. Increasing the amount of energy batteries can store makes it easier for increasingly clean sources of electricity to power our buildings, vehicles, factories and businesses.

For the transport industry, a more energy-dense battery could cut costs or expand the range of electric vehicles, addressing the two biggest issues keeping consumers from giving up on gas enthusiasts. It also promises to offer consumer appliances that last longer between grid batteries or charges, which can save more energy from solar and wind farms.

Berdichevsky says energy density is the key to the “electrification of everything.” Innovative Under 35 in 2017.

In the case of the new fitness wearable, new battery materials and other improvements have made it possible for Boston-based Whoop to shrink the device by 33% while maintaining five days of battery life. The product is now thin enough to fit into “smart clothes” and be worn like a watch. It goes on sale on September 8th.

Sila explained $590 million financing In January it also formed partnerships to develop battery materials for automakers, including BMW and Daimler. The company said its technology could eventually provide up to 40% more energy to lithium-ion batteries.

Preventing fires

Berdichevsky interviewed and landed a job at Tesla before his senior year at Stanford University, where he was studying to earn a mechanical engineering degree. He eventually played a key role in addressing a potentially existential risk for the company: A fire at any of the thousands of batteries installed in a vehicle would ignite the entire package.

He established a program to systematically evaluate a series of battery pack designs. After hundreds of tests, the company has developed a combination of battery arrangements, heat transfer materials and cooling channels that largely prevent runaway fires.

After Tesla launched the Roadster, Berdichevsky felt he had to commit to another five years to see the company through the development of its next vehicle, the Model S – or take the opportunity to try something new.

Finally, he decided he wanted to build something of his own.

Berdichevsky returned to Stanford for a graduate program in materials, thermodynamics, and physics in hopes of finding ways to fundamentally improve storage. After graduating, he spent a year as an entrepreneur at Sutter Hill Ventures, looking for ideas that could form the basis of his own business.

During this time, he came across something scientific. paper Identifying a method for producing silicon-based particles for lithium-ion battery anodes.

Researchers have long viewed silicon as a promising way to boost energy in batteries because its atoms can bond with 10 times more lithium ions than graphite. This means that they hold much more of the charged molecules that produce the electric current in a battery. But the silicon anodes tended to break up during charging, as they swelled to accommodate the ions traveling back and forth between the electrodes.

The paper, co-authored by Georgia Institute of Technology professor Gleb Yushin, highlighted the possibility of developing rigid silicone materials with a porous core. easily accept and release lithium ions.

The following year, Berdichevsky founded Sila with Yushin and another former Tesla engineer, Alex Jacobs.

Obstacles and delays

The company spent the next decade working on more than 50,000 iterations of chemistry, fine-tuning its methods and materials while increasing production capacity. Initially, he decided to develop materials that lithium-ion battery manufacturers could replace, rather than pursue the path of producing more expensive and riskier complete batteries.

However, Sila is not as far away as she initially hoped.

After securing several million dollars from the ARPA-E division of the U.S. Department of Energy, the company at one point told the research agency that its materials could be in products by 2017 and vehicles by 2020. In 2018, when Sila announced its deal with BMW, it said its particles could help power the German automaker’s EVs by 2023.

Berdichevsky said the company now expects to be in vehicles “like 2025”. He says solving “last mile” problems is more difficult than they expected. There were challenges, such as working with battery manufacturers to get the best performance from the new materials.

“We were naively optimistic about the challenges of scaling and bringing products to market,” he said in an email.

Whoop news shows that Sila has been able to engineer the particles to offer safety, lifecycles and other battery performance benchmarks similar to those achieved in current products.