Better batteries mean better products. They give us longer-lasting smartphones, anxiety-free electric transport, and potentially, more efficient energy storage for large-scale buildings like data centers. But battery tech is frustratingly slow to advance, due to both the chemical processes involved and the challenges that exist around commercializing new battery designs. It remains incredibly tough for even the most promising battery experiments to find their way out of research labs and into the devices we carry.

That hasn't stopped people from trying. In recent years researchers and technologists have presented a variety of ways in which the materials in rechargeable lithium batteries—the kind in your phone right now—can be tweaked to improve battery density and, more importantly, battery safety. These technologies aren't going to make it to market in time for the Next Big Product Launch, but as we watch our phones slurp up the last dribble of power at the end of a long day, we can dream about the future.

Battery Basics

Complex battery technology can make even the most tech-savvy person feel like they need a PhD in chemistry to make sense of it, so here's an attempt to break it down. Most handheld and portable electronics use lithium ion batteries, which are made up of an anode, a cathode, a separator, an electrolyte, a positive current, and a negative current. The anode and cathode are the "ends" of the battery; a charge is generated and stored when the lithium ions (carried by the electrolyte) move between the two ends of the battery.

Lithium ion is still considered to be one of the lightest and most efficient battery solutions. But because it only has so much physical energy density, there are limits to how much of a charge it can hold. It's also sometimes dangerous: if something goes awry with the separator, and electrodes come in contact with one another, the battery starts to heat up. And liquid electrolytes are highly flammable. This often is what leads to exploding batteries. "[Electric] car crashes, Samsung phones–those are mostly thermal runaway problems," says Partha Mukherjee, who researches energy storage and conversion at Purdue University's school of mechanical engineering.

Some of the solutions being worked on now introduce alternative materials that increase the efficiency and thermal stability of batteries—for example, using silicon nanoparticles for the anode instead of commonly-used carbon graphite, or using solid electrolytes instead of liquid ones.

Silicon Anode

Typically, graphite anode materials are used in lithium ion batteries. But microscopic silicon particles have been emerging as a more efficient replacement for graphite–and at least one company thinks this technology will come to market within the next year.

"An atom of silicon can store about 20 times more lithium than atoms of carbon," says Gene Berdichevsky, the CEO of California-based Sila Nanotechnologies and an early Tesla employee. "Essentially, it takes fewer atoms to store the lithium, so you can have a smaller volume of material storing the same amount of energy" as a typical graphite material. He says Sila Nano will launch its first battery product for the consumer market early next year. At launch, Berdichevsky expects to see 20 percent improvement in battery life over traditional lithium ion batteries.

Others have already pursued a silicon anode as a solution to today's battery problems; there's an entire consortium dedicated to the cause, which includes the Argonne, Sandia, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Berdichevsky and Sila co-founder and CTO Gleb Yushin say what sets their research apart is that they believed they've solved the "expansion" problem. Silicon has a tendency to swell, essentially destroying batteries with every charge. Sila's tech involves tucking the microscopic silicon particles into tiny spherical structures inside the battery that leave some room for the silicon to expand.