Researchers in California have unveiled a brand new type of lithium ion battery that they say they're willing to stand by, as well as stand on.

The design team, from the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, say their new battery out-performs the current industry standard by three times and is relatively inexpensive to make, since its key material is the same stuff that practically gives your feet third-degree burns when you kick off your sandals at the beach -- yes, sand.

"This is the holy grail -- a low cost, non-toxic, environmentally friendly way to produce high performance lithium ion battery anodes," Zachary Favors, a graduate student who spearheaded the idea for the new battery after a moment of innovative clarity at the beach, said in a university news release.  

Favors' shoreline inspiration led him to realize sand is primarily made up of quartz, or silicon dioxide, and silicon, it was discovered years ago, has the potential to be a revolutionary anode, or negative part of the battery that attracts charged lithium ions.

Graphite is the current standard material for the anode, explains a university news release, but as electronics have become more powerful, graphite shown limits to its ability to be improved and adapted to newer technologies.

Favors, who envisions his new battery mainly energizing personal electronics and electric vehicles, ended up working with UCR engineering professors Cengiz and Mihri Ozkan -- with whom he is now pursuing the replacement of battery graphite with nanoscale silicon, an individual particle of which can be measured within a billionth of a meter.

A known problem with nanoscale silicon, however, has been that it tends to degrade rather fast and is difficult to produce in large quantities.

Focused on overcoming both those problems, Favors searched the country for an area with a high concentration of quartz and landed back in area he called home growing up, a region east of Dallas, Texas, dubbed Cedar Creek Reservoir.

After acquiring his needed samples, Favors headed back to the UCR lab, where he milled the Texas quartz down to the nanometer scale and purified it to where it took on a bright white color and texture similar to that of powdered sugar.

The powdery quartz was then combined with grounded salt and magnesium and heated, with the salt acting as a heat absorber and the magnesium able to pull oxygen from the quartz.

The end product of the heating process was pure nano-silicon, which, to the research team's happy surprise, assumed a porous, 3-D consistency, which is optimal for improving the performance of batteries

The improved performance could mean expanding the expected lifespan of silicon-based electric vehicle batteries up to 3 times or more, which would be significant for consumers, considering replacement batteries cost thousands of dollars. For cell phones or tablets, it could mean having to recharge every three days, instead of every day.

The findings -- which suggest could lead to at least tripling the charge durations, not to mention overall lifespans, of batteries -- have been published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, under the research title "Scalable Synthesis of Nano-Silicon from Beach Sand for Long Cycle Life Li-ion Batteries."