Multi-scale Modelling

This project brings together a multidisciplinary team to develop fast, highly accurate models, enabling the development of digital twins to speed up battery development and ensure safe operation for longer battery life. Accurate simulations of batteries will enable battery makers and users to improve designs and performance without creating expensive prototypes to test every new material or new type or configuration of cells.

The project’s research bridges science and engineering, working innovatively alongside UK industry to deliver impact. Its internationally recognised experts are developing new digital and experimental techniques for understanding battery behaviour at the atomistic, continuum and system scales. Fast, accurate models, incorporating the most complete physics and advanced mathematical techniques are being developed to be directly usable for industry, enabling digital twinning of whole cells and packs. Atomistic-scale accuracy will parameterise higher level models and tackle key challenges, such as the complex interactions at the electrolyte-electrode interface. Rapid experimental parameterisation methods are being improved, greatly reducing the time and cost of customising models for specific applications. The experimentally validated models resulting from the project should be capable of predicting the useful life of lithium-ion batteries, as a function of how they are both made and used.

New from 2026 will be working groups on modelling sodium-ion, solid-state and lithium-metal, working in collaboration with the other Faraday Institution projects to develop materials and cells for these next-generation technologies.

Timeline with milestones / deliverables (to March 2030)

• Expand on the physics and degradation models in PyBaMM (Python Battery Mathematical Modelling) and examine coupling effects between them.
• Extend and/or create new continuum modelling frameworks for sodium-ion, solid-state and lithium-metal batteries.
• Extend and unify the physics around phase-change hysteresis models, including of LFP/LMFP cathodes and silicon anodes.
• Further upgrade the PyBOP and PyPROBE platforms to support automated fitting, and help reduce experimental parameterisation time.
• Further upgrade the PyECN platform to capture heterogeneous behaviour.
• Extend the advanced atomistic models of crucial reactions at interfaces and bridge this scale to the continuum scale modelled in PyBaMM by supplying estimates for parameters that are difficult to measure experimentally.
• Extend the data set on long-term cell ageing, using rigorously controlled experiments.
• Implement new models for advanced state estimation and control.

Project innovations

A common modelling framework – PyBaMM – has been established and multiple degradation mechanisms added. It is an open-source model, which is easy to use and provides a high-quality resource for the battery community to explore the mathematical theories with a minimum of coding effort.#

Rigorous, standardised parameterisation techniques have been developed. Spin-out About:Energy is providing parameterised models as a service to increase access for industry. A second start-up, Ionworks is bringing the benefits of PyBaMM to a wider audience, including industry, via consultancy and the development of professional user interfaces. The Battery Parameter eXchange is an open standard to support the wider adoption of physics -based models by the battery industry.

Improvements to atomistic modelling were released as part of ONETEP and an ultrafast solver called DandeLiion has also been developed, which is optimised for speed. The physical models in both PyBaMM and DandeLiion now incorporate thermodynamics, mechanics and long-term ageing.

Principal Investigator
Professor Gregory Offer
Imperial College London

Project Leader
Dr Jacqueline Edge
University of Birmingham

Project Manager
Dr Saira Naeem
Imperial College London

University Partners
Imperial College London (Lead)
University of Birmingham
University of Bristol
University of Oxford
University of Portsmouth
University of Southampton
University of Warwick

Research Organisations, Facilities and Institutes
UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC)

+ 17 Industrial Partners

The Faraday Institution’s Multi-scale Modelling project has been enabled thanks to funding from the Battery Innovation Programme, through the Department for Business and Trade and delivered by Innovate UK.

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