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Worldwide Unique, Fully Digitalized Laboratory for Accelerated Battery Material Development

In a cooperation between the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT/DE) and the University of Ulm/DE, a radically new paradigm for battery material development is being pursued at the POLiS Cluster of Excellence and the Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU/DE): in the final stage of expansion, the now completed facility will be able to build batteries around the clock, analyse thousands of interfaces, evaluate them using Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, and plan new experiments. This should decisively accelerate research into new battery materials. New types of powerful and sustainable batteries are needed for the transportation and energy transition. This poses a major challenge because it takes decades from the idea to the finished product using current methods. The new lighthouse project will provide important impetus to accelerate the development process. 

Science Minister Theresia Bauer said during her visit to POLiS and the HIU on the occasion of the launch: “With the funding of this new materials development platform, a globally unique research infrastructure has been created. We hope it will provide a significant boost to research into energy storage systems, which are essential in the transformation of our energy system and our mobility. At the same time, the funding has enabled us to recruit Prof. Helge Stein as a creative and enterprising mind for our team in Ulm.”

“We are now able to synthesize and assemble batteries and their individual components in an automated way, trigger a measurement and evaluate it in a fully automated way. Based on the data, the AI-supported system can now even decide which experiment to perform next,” explained tenure-track Prof. Helge Stein (KIT), Research Unit Spokesperson at POLiS. He and his group developed the combinatorial material synthesis, high throughput characterisation, and data mining techniques with the help of AI methods in experiment evaluation and planning. The facility represents the first fully integrated Platform for Accelerated Electrochemical Energy Storage Research (PLACES/R). Battery research is characterized by the search for the ideal combination of materials, their composition and process technologies. Testing all possible variations with all materials would take millennia using classical methods.

“Our facility can test several hundred such variations a day. This is roughly equivalent to the average life’s work of a researcher,” said Prof. Stein. In addition to acceleration through automation, the algorithms and AI can achieve an additional factor of 10 faster optimisation, bringing promising battery materials to market faster and at lower cost.

The research facility is also embedded in an European framework. Data collected by the facility from all areas of the battery development cycle will be shared with 34 institutions from 15 countries in the BIG-MAP project of the European research initiative  BATTERY 2030+.

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