Liverpool partners in EU project to speed up battery development
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Researchers from the University's Stephenson Institute for Renewable Energy and the Materials Innovation Factory are partners in a €20M EU project to significantly accelerate the speed of battery development while keeping an eye on sustainability.
BIG-MAP - which stands for Battery Interface Genome – Materials Acceleration Platform - brings together 34 academic and industrial partners from 15 countries and aims to intensify data exchange and cooperation operating within the broader framework of the BATTERY2030+ initiative.
Liverpool researchers are contributing their knowledge and expertise in battery electrochemistry, alongside research using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic platforms to design new materials to support energy technologies to the project.
Professor Laurence Hardwick heads up Liverpool’s involvement in the project. He said: “I am delighted that the University of Liverpool is a partner in this major European initiative to design batteries with better performance, greater storage options and longer life by developing AI-assisted methods to accelerate the discovery of new materials and battery concepts.”
Project leader Tejs Vegge of Denmark’s Technical University (DTU) said: “We have to reinvent the way we invent batteries. In concrete numbers, this means accelerating development time by 5-10 times relative to the current rate of discovery within the next 5-10 years."
BIG-MAP also envisions the use of robots “to explore the complex chemical space” much faster. Data sharing will also facilitate the work of researchers spread out across space and timezones at different partner institutions.
BIG-MAP is supported by the Battery2030+ initiative and led by Denmarks’s TU.