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Your Batteries Have Expired Downtime


ALAMEDA, California — The new Whoop fitness tracker wraps around the wrist like any other health monitor or smartwatch. But you can also buy a sports bra or leggings equipped with this little device, which can be an electronic strip sewn into the fabric of the clothes.

Whoop’s chief technology officer, John Capodilupo, said squeezing a fitness tracker into such a slim package is no small feat. It required a completely new type of battery. Made by California start-up Sila, the battery provided more power to the tiny fitness tracker than older batteries while maintaining the same battery life.

While that may not sound jarring, Sila’s battery is part of a wave of new battery technologies that could lead to and assist new designs in consumer electronics. accelerate the electrification of cars and airplanes. they can even help storing electricity in the power gridis helping efforts to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.

New battery types may not dazzle consumers like new apps or gadgets. But like small transistors, they are at the center of technological progress. If batteries don’t evolve too much, the devices they power won’t either.

Companies like Enovix, QuantumScape, Solid Power, and Sila have been developing these batteries for over a decade, and some hope to hit mass production around 2025.

Sila’s CEO and co-founder, Gene Berdichevsky, was an early Tesla employee who oversaw battery technology when the company made its first electric car. introduced in 2008 Tesla Roadster It used a battery based on lithium-ion technology, the same battery technology that powers laptops, smartphones, and other consumer devices.

Tesla’s popularity, coupled with the rapid growth of the consumer electronics market, sparked a new wave of battery companies. Mr. Berdichevsky left Tesla in 2008 to work on what eventually became Sila. Another entrepreneur, Jagdeep Singh, founded QuantumScape after purchasing one of the first Tesla Roadsters.

Both saw how lithium-ion batteries could change the car market. They saw an even greater opportunity if they could produce a more powerful type of battery.

“Lithium-ion batteries had just healed well enough, but they remained stable,” said Mr. Berdichevsky. “We wanted to push the technology further.”

At the same time, Congress created the Advanced Research Projects Agency-ARPA-E for Energy to promote research and development in new energy technologies. The agency nurtured new battery companies with funding and other support. Ten years later, these efforts are starting to bear fruit.

After raising more than $925 million in funding, Sila employs approximately 250 people at its small research center and factory in the small island city of Alameda, west of Oakland. When he and two other entrepreneurs founded the company in 2011, Mr. Berdichevsky thought they would need about five years to bring a battery to market. It took 10 of them.

The Whoop 4.0 fitness tracker, which goes on sale Wednesday for between $18 and $30 a month subscription fee, is an early indication of how Sila’s technology can work in the mass market.

The battery provides 17 percent more power density than the battery used by Whoop’s previous fitness tracker. This means the device could be a third smaller while introducing a new set of body sensors and maintaining the same battery life.

Sila and Whoop, a Boston company founded by a former Harvard athlete (named after a pet phrase he used before big games), said they have the manufacturing capacity needed to install the new battery in millions of devices in the coming years.

A device with a small market footprint, the fitness tracker may seem like a baby step. But it’s an indication of Sila’s hopes to expand the technology to electric cars and other markets.

“If this kind of thing makes its way into a smartphone or other consumer device, it’s a sign of real progress,” said Venkat Viswanathan, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Carnegie Mellon University, who specializes in battery technologies. “This is not easy.”

Sila isn’t exactly a battery company. It sells a new material (silicon powder) that could significantly improve the efficiency of batteries, and plans to manufacture them using many of the same factories and other infrastructures that make lithium-ion batteries.

Today’s batteries are based on the reciprocating motion of lithium atoms. This generates power because each atom is in a positively charged state, meaning it is missing a single electron. In this case, these lithium atoms are said to be ionized. That’s why they are called lithium-ion batteries.

When you connect an electric car to a charging station, lithium-ion atoms collect on one side of the battery, called the anode. When you start the car and drive on the road, the battery provides electrical power as the atoms move to the other side, the cathode. This is possible thanks to the chemical makeup of the anode, cathode and parts around the battery.

Typically, the anode is made of graphite. To improve the efficiency of the battery, Sila replaces graphite with silicon, which can put more lithium atoms in a smaller space. This means more efficient batteries.

Today, the company produces this silicone powder at its small facility in Alameda. It then sells the powder to a battery manufacturer—Sila doesn’t identify the other company that puts the material into its current process and manufactures new batteries for the Whoop fitness tracker.

“We are renovating the factories that are in use today,” said Mr. Berdichevsky.

Carnegie Mellon professor Dr. Viswanathan said this approach gives Sila a significant advantage over many of its competitors, while other companies are taking different paths to improve the way lithium-ion batteries are made.

Companies like Sila and QuantumScape already have partnerships with automakers and expect their batteries to arrive in cars by the middle of the decade. They hope their technology will significantly reduce the cost of electric cars and expand their driving range.

“If we want to bring electric cars into the mainstream, we have to bring them down to the $30,000 price point,” said Mr Singh, QuantumScape CEO. “You can’t do that with today’s batteries.”

They also hope their batteries will lead to new devices and vehicles. Smaller, more efficient batteries could spur the development of “smart glasses” (glasses embedded in small computers), allowing designers to fit a more agile set of technology into smaller, lighter frames. The same battery technology could supposedly revive flying cars, a new type of electric aircraft This could make commuting easier in major cities a decade from now.

However, Dr. These are just two possibilities, as “all aspects of life will become more electrified,” Viswanathan said.



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