Lithium-ion batteries have just made a big leap into a small product

The Alameda, California-based materials company has spent the past decade increasing the energy stored in lithium-ion batteries, advances that could enable smaller gadgets and much longer-range electric vehicles.

Sila has developed silicon-based particles that can replace graphite in the anodes and retain more lithium ions that carry current in the battery.

Now the company is launching its product on the market for the first time, providing part of the anode powder in the battery of the upcoming Whoop 4.0, suitable for carrying. It’s a small device, but a potentially big step forward in the field of batteries, where promising lab results often fail to lead to commercial success.

“Think of Whoop 4.0 as our Tesla roadster,” said Gene Berdichevsky, Sila’s chief executive, who, as Tesla’s seventh employee, helped solve some of the critical battery challenges for the company’s first electric car. “This is indeed the first device on the market to prove this breakthrough.”

The company’s materials, with a little help from other achievements, increased the energy density in the battery of the fitness tracker by about 17%. This is a significant profit in an area that is usually an inch ahead by a few percentage points per year.

This is equivalent to about four years of standard progress, “but in a big leap,” said Venkat Visunathan, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

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

For the transport sector, a more energy-dense battery can reduce costs or expand the range of electric vehicles by solving two of the biggest problems that discourage consumers from giving up their gas. It also promises to supply mains batteries that can save more energy than solar and wind farms, or custom gadgets that last longer between charges.

Energy density is the key to “electrifying everything,” said Berdichevski, an innovator under 35 in 2017.

In the case of the new fitness carrier, new battery materials and other improvements have made it possible for the 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 clothing” as well as be worn as a watch. It goes on sale on September 8.

Sila, which announced $ 590 million in funding in January, also has partnerships to develop battery materials for automakers, including BMW and Daimler. The company said its technology could eventually pack up to 40 percent more energy into lithium-ion batteries.

Fire prevention

Berdichevsky interviewed and got a job at Tesla before his senior year at Stanford University, where he worked for a degree in mechanical engineering. Ultimately, he played a key role in dealing with a potentially existential risk to the company: a fire in one of the thousands of batteries placed in a vehicle would ignite the entire package.

He created a program for the systematic evaluation of a series of battery designs. After hundreds of tests, the company developed a combination of batteries, heat transfer materials and cooling ducts that largely prevented escaped fires.

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

In the end, he decided he wanted to build something of his own.

Berdichevsky returned to Stanford for a master’s program in materials, thermodynamics and physics, hoping to find ways to improve storage at a fundamental level. After graduating, he spent a year as an entrepreneur at a residency at Sutter Hill Ventures, looking for ideas that could be at the heart of his own business.

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

Researchers have long seen silicon as a promising way to increase energy in batteries because its atoms can bind 10 times more lithium ions by weight than graphite. This means that they hold much more than the charged molecules that produce electricity in the battery. But silicone anodes tend to break down during charging as they swell to accommodate ions that move back and forth between the electrodes.

The paper, co-authored by Gleb Yushin, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, highlights the possibility of developing hard, porous-core silicon materials that could more easily absorb and release lithium ions.

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

Obstacles and delays

Over the next decade, the company refined its methods and materials, working on more than 50,000 iterations of chemistry, while increasing its production capacity. He initially decided to develop input materials that lithium-ion battery manufacturers could replace instead of pursuing the more expensive and risky way to produce batteries themselves.

Power, however, is not as far away as he originally hoped it would be.

After providing several million dollars from the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E division, the company at one point told the research agency that the materials could be in products until 2017 and in vehicles until 2020. In 2018. When Sila announced its deal with BMW, he said its particles could help power the German carmaker’s electric vehicles by 2023.

Berdichevski says the company now expects to be in the vehicles by “sooner in 2025.” He says solving the “last mile” problem is simply more difficult than expected. The challenges include working with battery manufacturers to achieve the best performance of new materials.

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

Whoop news signals that Sila has been able to design the particles in a way that offers safety, life cycle and other battery performance indicators similar to those achieved in existing products.