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The race to build a better battery has drawn in some of the world’s biggest innovators — notably billionaire CEO Elon Musk, who is one of the players in the global drive to invent a low-cost, powerful battery to fuel the next-generation of electric cars.

Now, a University of ��ݮ��Ƶ team, that already has several patents for its silicon battery research, has developed a new technology that promises to extend the life of a lithium-ion battery by 40 to 60 per cent. Lithium-ion batteries power everything from smartphones, to wearable devices and electric cars. The new silicon technology would allow an electric car to travel up to 500 kilometres before its battery needs to be recharged and would drastically reduce its cost.

“Battery researchers have been working with silicon for a while but now we’ve found a way to overcome a critical challenge,” says , a ��ݮ��Ƶ chemical engineering professor leading a team of chemical engineering graduate students. “There’s been considerable investor interest in the new technology and we expect to have it commercialized and on the market within the next year.” Chen and his students’  in the latest issue of Nature Communications.

Chen’s team, along with the General Motors Global Research and Development Centre has developed a flash heat treatment for fabricated silicon-based lithium-ion electrodes that overcomes a long-standing problem with silicon: silicon contracts and expands with each charge, resulting in cracks that reduce battery performance, create short circuits and eventually cause the battery to shut down.

“The economical flash heat treatment creates uniquely structured silicon anode materials that deliver extended cycle life to more than 2000 cycles with increased energy capacity of the battery,” said Chen.

Graphite has long been used to build the negative electrodes in lithium-ion batteries, explains Chen, the Canada Research Chair in Advanced Materials for Clean Energy and a member of the ��ݮ��Ƶ Institute for Nanotechnology and the .  “But as batteries improve, graphite is slowly becoming a performance bottleneck because of the limited amount of energy that it can store.”

In contrast to graphite, the ��ݮ��Ƶ researchers found that silicon anode materials have a much higher capacity for lithium and, as a result, are capable of producing batteries with almost 10 times more energy. As well, because silicon batteries are smaller and more lightweight than what is now on the market, the overall weight of an electric vehicle would be significantly reduced.

Find out about more innovators at the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ in Defining Innovation, our 2015-16 State of the University Report. In the coming months, watch for more about how ��ݮ��Ƶ is Defining Innovation, by following the hashtag, #U��ݮ��ƵInnovation.

This article was originally featured on ��ݮ��Ƶ Stories.