Collaboration Award: University of Birmingham and Echion Technologies

Congratulations to the University of Birmingham and Echion Technologies for winning the 2024 Faraday Institution Community Award for Collaboration.  

Photo: Awards ceremony at Faraday Institution Conference 2024. From left to right: Rob Weatherup (representing the Henry Royce Institute – award sponsor), Fiona Coomer (Echion Technologies), Peter Slater (University of Birmingham), Martin Freer (CEO of the Faraday Institution).

This outstanding academic-industrial collaboration, led by Professor Peter Slater, has made significant advances in the development of new anode materials for high power lithium-ion batteries. This is a strong example of an impactful, long-standing academic-industry collaboration that has brought together university researchers at many different career stages with industry staff.

The collaboration, which has spanned 5+ years, has deployed innovative approaches to new materials development and has led to multiple patents and papers. This relationship showcases the wide-reaching impact that collaborations can have on academia output, the commercialisation of products by industry organisations, and the development of researchers involved.

Collaboration across multiple projects in the UK battery ecosystem 

Some of the researchers involved with the Echion Technologies / University of Birmingham collaboration.

The collaboration started in 2019 through an Innovate UK project, Scalable Ultra-Power Electric Vehicle Batteries (SUPErB), as part of the Faraday Battery Challenge (FBC). This led to an initial patent on new niobium oxide based anodes that show promise in delivering improvements to EV charging rate and cycle life and longevity in extreme conditions.  

Following the success of SUPErB, both partners had a strong commitment to extend the collaboration, and a Faraday Institution Industrial Fellowship was awarded in April 2021. The fellowship led to the identification of two new series of XNO® phases, assessment of their performance and in-depth materials characterisation, and a second patent. These new phases have been taken as new potential products into Echion’s new product development cycle, where they are being assessed for commercial viability and manufacturability. The fellowship has been extended to March 2025 to further advance the new materials development, targeting anode materials with even higher energy density. 

Two collaborative papers have been published in the Journal of Power Sources and ACS Applied Energy Materials, with a number of further papers in preparation following the publication of the second patent. These new papers will highlight materials with new chemical structures, and detail how their structure can be controlled through either doping or modifying synthesis routes, allowing controllable avenues to influence anode performance.  

Echion continues to commercialise and scale its product and company. In March 2024, the UK SME announced it had scaled up the manufacturing capacity of its XNO® materials to batches of over 100kg. The latest scale up efforts were carried out through Project SATE – a feasibility study as part of the Automotive Transformation Fund, funded by the Advanced Propulsion Centre. The project provided Echion with data important for quality control and process modelling capabilities – knowledge that will accelerate scale up of future production capability to one and then 2,000 metric tonnes a year. 

Extension of the collaboration to explore recycling routes 

The University of Birmingham/Echion collaboration was broadened in 2024 through an Industry Sprint project to evaluate recycling routes for the anode material in collaboration with researchers on the ReLiB project. Project NORDIC is evaluating hydrometallurgical and direct recycling routes for XNO® to determine the most feasible option to deliver a high-quality recycled product. 

The Sprint aims to define a high yield recovery process for XNO® from coated electrodes (scrapped during development or production) and from discharged cells. It is assessing total processing costs for each process and conducting a detailed benchmark characterisation of pristine material, production waste material and recovered material to determine performance post-recovery. The project represents a step towards Echion integrating XNO® recovery into an open- or closed-loop recycling process. 

Opportunities for researcher development 

During the course of the collaboration, multiple visits between Birmingham and Echion have provided training and development opportunities for researchers in both organisations, further strengthening the partnership. The link has extended across career stages and expertise. For example, the writing of the collaborative scientific papers has introduced PhD researchers and FUSE interns to the processes that industry organisations adopt in evaluating new battery materials.  

Further links have been built with the CATMAT project, with researchers from Echion attending and speaking at consortium meetings. Project researchers have been investigating how cathode materials under development can be integrated into high power batteries incorporating niobium oxide-based anodes.  

Congratulations to the team 

Please join us in congratulating the whole team, from the University of Birmingham (Peter Slater, Emma Kendrick, Paul Anderson, Gary Leeke, Elizabeth Driscoll, Yazid Lakhdar, Dominika Gastol, Alex Green, Yongxiu Chen and Aron Spiller) FUSE Interns (Gagandeep Nandera and Lauren-Marie Lawrence) and Echion Technologies (Alexander Groombridge, Wanwei Zhang, Jianshen Wu, Harry Geary, Maurits Houck, Daniel Martin, Fiona Coomer, Joshua Lewis, Andrew Pauza and Ramon Cabiscol), on the achievements of their outstanding academic-industrial collaboration! 

On winning the award

Over five years into our partnership with Echion, we have seen the impact that collaboration can have to both bolster academic knowledge and progress towards commercialisation for a real-world product. Our work has brought together academics at many different career stages, forging connections with industry staff, to develop the skills and experiences to improve this crucial technology.”

Professor Peter Slater, Professor of Materials Chemistry at the University of Birmingham

The teams at Echion and Birmingham are delighted to receive this award from the Faraday Institution. We have been working closely over the years with the research groups at Birmingham with many successes, and I hope we have showcased how academic and industrial researchers can come together to push the boundaries at the forefront of battery materials. We look forward to continuing our highly collaborative approach.”

Dr Alex Groombridge, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer, Echion

Everyone at Echion is honoured to receive this recognition from the Faraday Institution. Our ongoing collaborations, both within academia and industry, have been central to our mission of developing innovative battery solutions. This award is not just for us but for all our partners that we have worked with to reach this point too.”

Dr Fiona Coomer, Research and Development Programme Manager, Echion

Posted on September 11, 2024