The Faraday Institution - UKBIC collaborations facilitate scale up of battery manufacturing
To compete in the global electrification race, the UK must foster innovative collaborations. The £610 million Faraday Battery Challenge, part of the UKRI Challenge Fund investment, is delivering a mission-led, research and innovation programme that covers “Lab to Factory” development, research, and national scale-up infrastructure.
This case study – the first in a series – highlights the collaboration between two parts of the Faraday Battery Challenge – the Faraday Institution and the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC). The partnership is advancing application-inspired research towards commercialisation, yielding substantial benefits for both organisations, facilitating the exchange of ideas, providing training and career opportunities and delivering value to UKBIC customers. As one example, the collaboration is resulting in production cost and time savings by understanding the science behind the behaviour of electrode slurries.
| By the numbers | |
|---|---|
| 3 | hours of set up time saved on one UKBIC customer campaign through detailed understanding of rheology properties, minimising waste |
| 90 | members of the Faraday Institution have toured UKBIC, gaining an insight into battery manufacturing |
| 3 | Faraday Institution projects and an industry fellowship involved in UKBIC collaborations: Nextrode (electrode manufacturing), Multi-scale Modelling, and ReLiB (recycling and reuse) |
| 8 | university’s researchers involved in ongoing collaborations with UKBIC |
Aerial view of the UKBIC.
Industry Fellowship reduces manufacturing set up costs and time for UKBIC customers
Battery electrodes are manufactured by spreading a slurry – a semi-liquid mixture of powders and solvent – onto a metallic current collector by forcing it through a narrow slit – a slot die. The properties of the slurry – for example, how it flows (its rheology) impacts both the required set up of the electrode manufacturing equipment and the performance of the batteries produced.
Diagram of the electrode coating process. Courtesy of UKBIC.
Organisations that are developing new anode or cathode active materials will first make and test cells at a small scale – for example using a 1-litre then a 10-litre electrode slurry mix (available in a number of university or industry labs) before scaling production to a volume more representative of a full-scale manufacturing environment – such as the 220-litre mix at UKBIC. However, the slurry rheology is different when mixed at different scales, and differences are difficult to predict. If a slurry behaves in a way that is not expected during electrode manufacture it can take longer to set up the manufacturing process – leading to lost time and large amounts of manufacturing scrap, both of which are costly.
An Industry Fellowship between the University of Birmingham and UKBIC led by Dr Carl Reynolds and Professor Emma Kendrick has successfully transferred knowledge in the areas of electrode slurry characterisation and modelling between the two teams. It has improved UKBIC’s ability to measure the rheology of electrode slurries and thus accurately predict coating parameters as they are scaled up from lab to production scales.
Carl Reynolds and Emma Kendrick at the University of Birmingham.
The fellowship has further developed the understanding of how formulation impacts slurry stability and processability. The team now has a better understanding of the impact on slurry rheology of scaling up production. The company has installed rheology and surface tension characterisation equipment and as a direct result of the fellowship has an improved process for characterising and modelling coatings of new materials brought to UKBIC by their customers. These rheological parameters provide inputs to computational fluid dynamics models that are used to predict slurry coat-ability and inform initial process parameters for production. As a result, UKBIC has been able to reduce set up times and scrap rates for its customers when they use its scale-up facilities.
Typically we have had to make three shim changes to the slot die – that controls the thickness variation of the electrode coating – as we set up the manufacturing line for a new customer. In one recent customer campaign the simulation work allowed us to select the correct slot die gap setting before dialling in. This minimised waste, and, more importantly, the set up time. In a high-volume environment this would equate to around 0.4MWh of production.”
Ameir Mahgoub, Head of Product Engineering at UKBIC
This detailed understanding of rheology properties reduces the risk of set up going beyond a single working shift and ensures the slurry (which has a fixed “shelf life”) is coated within a narrower timeframe. In this customer campaign, three hours of set up time were saved. Ameir continues:
The rheology prediction has led to improved customer interactions. As our data set grows, we’ll be able to continue to improve our predictions of slurry properties from their formulation.
The ongoing collaboration between UKBIC and Nextrode is helping to tackle real industry challenges and de-risk barriers to scale-up. The collaboration demonstrates the Faraday Battery Challenge’s role in marrying research, innovation and scale-up to deliver positive impact for the UK battery industry. It further supports UKBIC’s mission to be the place to go for battery industrialisation. The project has enabled UKBIC’s electrode customers to benefit from the knowledge we’ve gained in the development and coating of their slurries.”
Industrial insight, opportunities for career growth, and facilitating promotions
The Faraday Institution – UKBIC collaboration is also bringing considerable benefits to researchers’ careers and knowledge of manufacturing processes. The collaboration is strongest into the Faraday Institution’s Nextrode project on electrode manufacturing. Technical leads from UKBIC regularly attend Nextrode project meetings and the whole Nextrode consortium benefited from touring UKBIC in March 2023.
The Nextrode consortium at UKBIC, March 2023.
Dr Leigh Mapledoram, University of Oxford and Project Manager of Nextrode, comments:
As a manufacturing-based project, being able to demonstrate to our researchers what battery manufacturing looks like at an industrial scale, to showcase our latest research and to build broad collaborations with UKBIC is very important.
Having a regular forum for hearing first hand from the team about what’s coming up next at UKBIC – like the Flexible Pilot Line – is so useful. It starts our thought processes about possible future interactions.”
Working with UKBIC has opened up career development opportunities for Faraday Institution researchers.
Being able to demonstrate that I led many aspects of the Industry Fellowship was instrumental in securing my recent promotion to Assistant Professor.”
Dr Carl Reynolds, University of Birmingham
Following the fellowship, UKBIC is supporting a submission Carl has made for an EPSRC new investigator award, “Tailored Rheological Instability for Coating Structuring (TRICS).”
UKBIC also supports the Faraday Institution PhD Training Programme. Three cohorts of PhD researchers have toured UKBIC (with another cohort receiving training on-line during the pandemic), giving them an insight into battery manufacturing. The organisation also part-sponsors a PhD researcher at UCL – Gargi Giri – who is a member of both the Nextrode project and the fifth cohort of Faraday Institution PhD researchers.
Faraday Institution PhD Cohort 5 at UKBIC.
Several members of the Faraday Institution research community have taken their research skills and experience to UKBIC, giving them opportunities to grow their careers. These include:
- Dr Kenneth Nwanoro was previously a Faraday Institution Research Fellow at the University of Lancaster as part of the Multi-scale Modelling Project before making the move to UKBIC as a Battery Modelling Engineer.
- Dr Dorota Matras was previously a Faraday Institution Research Associate on the CATMAT project based at Diamond Light Source. She made the move to UKBIC in July 2023 where she is now a Battery Materials Scientist. Read Dorota’s Faraday 500 interview from 2022.
Due to the multidisciplinary nature of Faraday Institution projects and the numerous collaborations between academic and industrial partners, my experiences gained at the Faraday Institution made my transition from academia to industry run smoothly. It’s also thanks to the Faraday Institution that I’m able to call upon a broad range of skills acquired in the laboratory and at synchrotron facilities, as well as through the various training and courses I participated in, during my present role at UKBIC.”
Dr Dorota Matras, Battery Materials Scientist, UKBIC
Battery assembly at the end of corridor at UKBIC.
About the Faraday Institution, UKBIC and the Faraday Battery Challenge
The Faraday Institution is the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research, skills development, market analysis, and early-stage commercialisation. Its research community spans 500+ researchers from 27 UK universities working on 10 application-inspired multi-disciplinary, multi-university research projects.
UKBIC is the UK’s national manufacturing battery development facility, providing manufacturing scale-up and skills for the battery sector. The facility is where businesses come to develop their battery manufacturing processes at the scale they need to move to industrial production. Those working in the industry can develop new skills by learning from specialist teams running the production line.
Created with an initial investment of £130m, an additional £74m from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is being used to enhance and expand the facility by installing a new Flexible Pilot Line to bridge the gap between UKBIC’s larger scale production line and small-scale demonstrator lines available elsewhere. It is also building a new Battery Development Laboratory, a Clean and Dry Zone, and a Cell Characterisation area.
The Faraday Institution and UKBIC are both key delivery partners for the Faraday Battery Challenge, delivered by Innovate UK for UK Research and Innovation. It is building a science superpower for batteries, supporting the UK’s world-class battery facilities along with growing and innovating businesses that are developing the battery supply chain for our future prosperity. The challenge combines research and capability development at the Faraday Institution, business-led innovation through Innovate UK, and manufacturing scale-up and skills development at the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre.
Case study published October 2024.
Read a further case study on UKBIC – Faraday Institution collaborations.