The Faraday Institution has announced five new projects as part of its mission to accelerate breakthroughs in energy storage technologies.

WMG at the University of Warwick (www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/wmg) is one of six university partners (plus six industry partners) involved in the Nextrode (next-generation electrode manufacturing) project, which is intended to revolutionise the way electrodes for Li-ion batteries are manufactured.

Today’s Li-ion batteries are made using a ‘slurry casting’ process, whereby the active materials are mixed in a wet slurry and coated onto thin foils of aluminium or copper, then dried and compressed.

WMG will examine this process with a view to being able to predictively model and optimise it, so that future electrodes can be cheaper, store more energy, and get to market faster.

To do this, WMG will use its ‘state of the art’ battery scale-up facility, as well as taking data from the UKBIC when it opens next year.

Furthermore, slurry-cast electrodes limit the performance of the battery, as the active electrochemical materials are uniformly distributed throughout the electrode structure.

Research has shown that arranging the materials in a structured way can dramatically improve battery performance, but at present there is no mass-manufacturing route to do so.

This project will investigate new manufacturing methods to create structured electrodes in a cost-effective way at high manufacturing volumes.

WNG’s David Greenwood said: “Battery manufacturing is a critical industry for the UK to grow.

“It is highly competitive, and to win, we will need excellence in both science and manufacturing.

“The Nextrode project brings these two elements together to make future Li-ion batteries for EVs more energy-efficient and affordable.

“Our unique research facilities are key to acquiring the knowledge required to deliver a step change in industrial capability.”