Gadgetory

would it be amazing if your smartphone could last more than one day without having to recharge I'm Jessica's all court for CNET here at Layton energy in Fremont California where that is not just a beautiful dream it is the future I'm here with Mark Jesco who is the vice president of research and development and they're working on a chemical composition that goes into batteries and helps them last longer how does this exactly work we've developed a new electrolyte system in here which can be used with any cathode or any anode material and this allows us to get very very high energy densities within our system we're using a lithium amide salt as opposed to the standard el ap s6 salts and this lithium amide salt it's very very stable so basically it cuts down on the creation of hydrofluoric acid and that's what helps the battery last longer that's correct okay so now we're gonna take a tour of your R&D facility here what are we looking at with these arms popping out and what we do in here is we get the materials ready for the battery so right now Alana is preparing materials she's weighing them out and getting them ready to put into cells so mark I see that this is the cathode room and I'm looking now at a spinning cylinder what is this this is the active material so the cathode active material that's the positive and what we do first is we take the active material powder we mix it with a binder and put it into solution what's it called this is the slurry slurry all right can we see it some black goo in here pretty much that's correct and we're gonna see what this goes on eggs know exactly how this helps to produce batteries the next step is the current collector where the slurry is coated and dried in a long oven we want to put as much active material into the cell to make the battery run longer so to do that we move over to this calendaring machine where we compress the electrodes the sheets are then cut into strips and then tabbed and that's gonna carry the electrons to the outside of the battery now the battery enters the winding room or the anode and cathode are shaped into cylindrical or pouch cells so this is one of our electrolyte filling stations where we put the our own proprietary lithium amide electrolyte into the cells now that the cell is made that's going to be part of the battery Leyden isn't finished yet because now they have to do some testing so we've got our trusty goggles here and what's going on this is an impact test we take a 20 pound weight who drops two feet directly onto the cell and it's meant to simulate an internal short-circuit we're showing that these cells are safe to transport on aircraft and also to get ul recognition and the tests aren't over yet so what we're going to do is we're going to fire a nail right through the cell and make sure that there's no fire no smoke no explosion so you can see that's an excellent result battery performance is the last thing they'll test as part of their research now well you won't be seeing Leyden batteries and today's smartphones and tablets they are on track to start cropping up sometime in 2013 for CNN I'm Jessica's all floors