THIS COULD BE THE FUTURE OF RECHARGEABLE BATTERIES.

It promises more power, better safety, faster charging, and a longer lifespan. And, in theory, could be any shape you want it to be. Private companies and research labs are racing to crack the code for a battery that could someday replace these, the ever-present lithium ion. And one company is taking it a step further and wants to change our idea of what a battery can even look like by 3D printing them.

Let's take a step back and explain what a battery is.

A typical battery works by converting chemical energy into electricity. We need a positive end, or cathode. In this case, a zinc-coated nail. And a negative end, or anode, which is our copper penny. We also need something to connect these two called the electrolyte. That's where our potato comes in. I'm just gonna do one in here. Each end reacts chemically with the potato and the anode actually releases electrons which travel along this wire back to the cathode.

This flow of electrons is actually what's converting that chemical reaction into electricity. Now that didn't really do anything, as you can see, but if we add a few more potatoes, we'll probably get this light to work. Thank you.

These clips are so hard.

And now... Lights, please.

Hey, that was pretty good.

So that's the foundation of any chemical battery.

Lithium ion batteries are some of the most successful versions of this but there's room for improvement and startups are adjusting two key elements of the design, the electrolyte and the anode.

- Most batteries today, pretty much every battery you will buy, has a liquid electrolyte in it.

- We actually call them lithium ion batteries because the electrolyte is full of lithium ions moving the charge around liquid electrolytes are great conductors. But they're volatile, particularly when damaged or at high temperatures. And if you watch the news, you've probably seen reports on incidents like this.

- [Announcer] Her phone caught fire.

- [News Anchor] Model S Plaid burst into flames earlier this week.

- May have sparked a fire at a local recycling plant is something that's plaguing those centers across the country.

- We get it. There's a safety issue. One solution is to use a more stable, non-flammable solid material instead. Right now, lots of companies building these solid-state batteries are experimenting with electrolytes made from all sorts of materials like ceramics, glasses, and polymers. The other big upgrade is finding a more powerful material to use for your anode. Your regular old lithium ion batteries use graphite which already works pretty well. But there is a more powerful candidate out there.

- The holy grail for battery anodes has been lithium metal. And that's not lost on people.

- So lithium metal has a higher capacity than other anodes like silicon or graphite, but it's hard to work with. It tends to form these little microscopic structures called dendrites that can short the battery. That's been a big problem for liquid electrolytes. But using a solid material could improve things.

- The way I think about dendrites is like the roots of a tree system. So the roots are growing. You wanna stop the roots from, you know, kind of coming into your house. So what do you do? You put a concrete wall or something really hard, so mechanically stopping.

- So a good solid electrolyte can stand up to those little dendrites and still allow for the easy flow of ions back and forth. Over the past few years, there's been a lot of improvement in these new materials. Today, leading startups are looking to get their pilot batteries out of the lab and into a factory. And one California-based company, Sakuu, is taking an even bigger swing. They're designing solid-state batteries with lithium metal anodes and they want to 3D print them.

- The only way to go into this direction of having more sustainable, safer, superior batteries is to, at some point in time, challenge the manufacturing process.

- So most batteries today are made with a process called roll-to-roll manufacturing. The materials are rolled out in long sheets and then cut down for individual battery layers. 3D printing, on the other hand, could let Sakuu cram more layers into the same amount of space, improving the overall capacity of the battery.

- [Ben] So it's not like today where you have them in a pouch and the battery is just inside, the layers are inside, it has to be sealed. But in the printer with a Sakuu Kavian platform, our printer platform, we can create these batteries right in the printer and this is how they look like.

- [Gianna] It's how Sakuu hopes to outcompete other solid-state startups and lithium ion makers who are sticking with roll-to-roll.

- So it really takes the combination of the good battery design and the superior manufacturing technology. Staying with roll-to-roll for sure would not enable us to even have higher energy densities than anybody else.

- Okay, a big caveat to all of this. Sakuu has 3D printed solid-state batteries in their lab, but has not yet fully printed a battery using their prototype. In fact, we couldn't even film the 3D printer prototype itself.

Sakuu says that's because there's just too much proprietary stuff going on that they're not ready to reveal to the public yet. They actually have this prototype built, they're doing tests and they're trying to figure out how to make the best battery using this manufacturing process. What we're about to show you is actually the 3D printed model of that 3D printer. Meta, I know!

- [Ben] This platform can use several, too. So it can print metals, it can print ceramics, and it can print polymers. And it's printing those layer by layer and that's the key aspect to make it faster.

- [Gianna] How fast? Well, we're not exactly sure yet. Sakuu hopes that one day each machine would be able to produce 40 megawatt hours of energy storage annually. In normal terms, that's about the same as 500 electric car batteries per year. But this prototype works differently than your conventional 3D printer. Usually a printer deposits a layer of material, waits for it to solidify, and then adds the next layer. Here, each layer gets printed and is quality controlled simultaneously.

Excess material can be recycled within the system. The layers are stacked tightly together at the very end and out pops a battery. But the most surprising perk of this process isn't power or safety or cost, it's really about form factor.

Look at these batteries, they're mostly rectangular or cylindrical. That's because it's hard when using roll-to-roll to actually make different shapes. It would require new tools, more waste and probably a higher price tag. 3D printing could be much more flexible.

- Look at this in the future, you will see batteries which actually become a part, an integral part of a product. For example, if you look at AR/VR glasses, the temple arm of the glasses could be a printed battery. Or you look at a a cell phone where maybe the case of the cell phone is actually a battery.

- [Gianna] So the battery isn't just more powerful itself. It can also fill in dead space, maximizing its footprint in a product and boosting power that way too. You wouldn't have to necessarily design a product around a battery.

You could design the battery around your product and this is obviously not the real printer. So what's the like footprint of one of these?

- [Ben] For this first one, the footprint is around 10 meters long. This is now our first prototype, right?

- [Gianna] Total reinvention is obviously risky. The company claims that their process could reduce manufacturing costs, but they wouldn't share the actual price tag of the printer with us. On top of that, you're introducing a new manufacturing process to an established industry and that's always gonna be a challenge. And they're not the only ones taking this approach. Other companies like Blackstone Resources and Photocentric are also working on 3D printed batteries. While all this R&D has been happening, lithium ion batteries are just getting cheaper and more powerful. That's really tough to compete with. Sakuu is currently building out its first factory and hopes to get sample batteries out to their clients in 2023.

- So this facility will only host our own battery manufacturing, which is of course, needed to prove the process to show everybody that our technology works successfully.

- [Giaana] While startups like Sakuu are putting their first generation products to the test, the need for more advanced batteries is only growing. The goal isn't just to get a better battery into your phone, it's increasing range for electric vehicles and large scale storage for a decarbonized energy grid. But to take on the world of lithium ion, newcomers can't just be a little better.

- Which means that what we have to do to get this material to be commercial is we've got to make them perfect because if it's not perfect, they've become a significant challenge when it comes to trying to make this into a battery that'll stand the test of time and power all the things we want to power.

- That one's there.