New Breakthrough Could Double Your Battery Life

Your smartphone may soon go twice as long between charges as it does now. And you'll have a vacuum-cleaner maker to thank.

MORE: Smartphones with the Longest Battery Life

The lithium-ion battery currently powering your smartphone or other electronic devices uses a liquid electrolyte to produce a charge. Sakti3's approach replaces that liquid with solid lithium electrodes. As a result, Sakti3 says, it can pack more power into a battery. Last August, the company told Scientific American that its lithium battery cells had reached an energy density of 1,143 Watt-hours per liter, which would be double the energy density of a top-of-the line lithium-ion battery.

Sakti3 founder and CEO Ann Marie Sastry at an October 2014 Ted Talk

The trick will be to move from the prototype stage to large-scale production, and that's where Dyson's involvement comes in. The vacuum-cleaner maker is going to help commercialize Sakti3's battery, with the improved batteries appearing in Dyson products first, before being made available to other device makers. That could mean double the 20-hour battery life of Dyson's cordless vacuum cleaners, although founder James Dyson hints to the Wall Street Journal that his company would be interested in moving into new product categories.

A better battery would certainly be welcome in the consumer-electronics world, especially when many top smartphones still require a charge at some point during the day. Carmakers have been particularly interested in the work being done by Sakti3, especially if it means pushing the range of electric vehicles to 300 miles or more between charges while also potentially lowering the sticker price on electric vehicles.

Solid-state batteries promise other benefits besides more power and lower costs. They're seen as more environmentally friendly than current lithium-ion batteries, and by eliminating the flammable liquid electrolyte, solid-state batteries create less of a chance for battery explosions.

The road to a better battery is lined with notable failures in the 24 years since the lithium-ion battery's commercial debut. Sakti3 and Dyson have a lot of work ahead of them before we're going twice as long between charges. But the promise of the technology they're working to commercialize makes this a project worth watching.

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Philip Michaels is a Managing Editor at Tom's Guide. He's been covering personal technology since 1999 and was in the building when Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone for the first time. He's been evaluating smartphones since that first iPhone debuted in 2007, and he's been following phone carriers and smartphone plans since 2015. He has strong opinions about Apple, the Oakland Athletics, old movies and proper butchery techniques. Follow him at @PhilipMichaels.

2 Comments Comment from the forums

TechyInAZ

Cool! Glad that a new generation of battery is finally replacing the good but not that great lithium-ion.

I hope this greatly increases the charge life of the battery. I mean, when you charge your battery over and over again, over time the charge time decreases. I hope they fix this too. :D
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PhilipMichaels

I hope this greatly increases the charge life of the battery. I mean, when you charge your battery over and over again, over time the charge time decreases. I hope they fix this too. :D

Sakti3's Ann Marie Sastry actually addresses this very point in the TedTalk she gave last year -- how current batteries lose their charge over time. It sounds like Sakti's approach will address this, but as always, we'll have to wait until a solid-state battery is actually powering a device to find out for sure how well it holds a charge over time.
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