UKRI’s battery programme has invested £610 million to support the UK’s growing battery technology industry.
The Faraday Battery Challenge is a UKRI Challenge Fund programme that’s investing £610 million to develop a high-tech, high-value and high-skill battery technology industry. Its goal is to make the UK a science superpower for batteries by supporting world-class battery facilities and innovative businesses in the battery supply chain.
The Challenge supports innovation from early-stage, university-led research through to near-commercial scale facilities to test manufacturing. It is focused on three areas: research, business-led innovation and scale-up. The Challenge draws together these areas to accelerate battery technology commercialisation, harnessing our best talent toward solving the challenges for battery technology.
Batteries are a critical part of the UK’s net zero strategy, which includes a commitment to make all new cars and vans zero-emission at the tailpipe. Sales of electric vehicles are increasing and manufacturers must meet demand with batteries that last longer, charge faster and deliver power when it’s needed.
From sourcing critical materials in the UK to software that is helping engineers design new battery module designs, the projects below demonstrate how the Faraday Battery Challenge is supporting the UK’s growing battery technology industry.
Anaphite
Although EVs can be roughly half as expensive as petrol and diesel cars to run, the upfront cost of owning one can be off-putting for some would-be buyers. Much of that extra cost comes from the battery, which can account for as much as 30% of an EV’s overall cost.
Anaphite has developed a chemical compositing process to overcome the challenges in preparing materials for dry battery electrode coating. Dry coating could reduce the cost of battery cell manufacturing by up to 40%, which will help make EVs more affordable and attractive to drivers.
As well as helping reduce local air pollution through more EVs replacing petrol and diesel cars, the company’s dry coating process could also contribute to net zero by eliminating the energy required by the process it is designed to replace.
Current battery manufacturing is based on wet coating – covering electrodes with a chemical slurry then using energy-hungry ovens to dry them. Wet coating a 28kwh lithium ion battery can produce up to three tonnes of CO2 – the same as driving a petrol car from Bangor to Beijing and back. The process is expensive, time-consuming and uses toxic solvents. Anaphite’s proprietary dry coating technology eliminates the need for industrial drying, slashing carbon emissions, cutting costs and making it safer for battery manufacturers.
Anaphite’s commercial and partnerships lead, Dr Jennifer Chanell, said: “We believe our creative chemistry approach will help the industry to confidently transition from wet coating to dry coating, providing it with the flexibility and scalability required. Our target is to demonstrate that our technology can enable the production of dry-coated cathodes that match the performance of the state-of-the-art wet-coated cathodes.”
Since 2019, the company has led battery technology projects with support from UK Research and Innovation. Its first funded project developed a composite material for use in lithium ion battery electrodes, aimed at improving battery performance. A later project explored inexpensive and efficient ways to scale up the manufacturing of this composite using established chemical engineering processes.
Anaphite’s success in these projects led to its participation in the Advanced Propulsion Centre’s Technology Development Accelerator Programme, which helped the company identify routes to market for its dry coating technology. As a result, Anaphite switched its focus completely from applications in wet to dry coating in 2023.
Prior to closing its £10.4 million Series A funding round in 2024, the company raised £1.6 million of public and private investment through Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships programme. The Investor Partnership funding enabled Anaphite to accelerate the development of its chemical compositing process, validate its dry electrode production process and build relationships with global organisations specialising in dry coating technologies.
It also enabled the company to hire three additional members of staff, taking it from 26 to 29 employees, and to buy dry coating hardware that enhances Anaphite’s in-house testing capabilities.
Jennifer said: “UKRI’s support has been critical for us commercially. It allowed us to derisk the development of our technology which was instrumental in ensuring that we secured the level of validation and progress required with our customers to raise our Series A funding.”
Voltt
This project is speeding up the development of EV batteries, reducing the cost and carbon emissions of producing the batteries needed to fully electrify the automotive industry.
With governments such as the UK’s banning the sale of new petrol and diesel-powered vehicles by 2030, electric-vehicle manufacturers are keen to offer customers batteries that perform better and last longer than existing types.
But developing these new batteries is expensive because up to now it has required physical testing and prototyping, which takes months, sometimes even years, to complete. The process also produces its own carbon emissions, adding to the problem it is trying to solve.
Voltt is a project led by About:Energy that is using modelling and virtual iteration to speed up battery development while greatly reducing carbon emissions. The project, which also involves Imperial College London, is providing insight into the physical properties of batteries across their lifespan, from new to degraded, something that existing software platforms cannot do. This will give manufacturers access to specific battery datasets and models that can be used in existing modelling software.
About:Energy’s chief operating officer and co-founder, Kieran O’Regan, said: “Degradation and lifetime are hard to incorporate into battery design because companies don’t often have, say, a year of degradation data to implement in a design. Now we can support companies to improve upon or build a new design that considers battery lifetime degradation, which is important for total cost of ownership and sustainability.”
The Voltt project was funded by Innovate UK through the Faraday Battery Challenge. The funding gave About:Energy enough capital to develop its Voltt platform, get manufacturers interested in the platform and then raise private investment to develop it further and grow the company. About:Energy raised around £2.7 million across two rounds of seed capital funding, which enabled it to grow its staff from 10 to 15 permanent employees.
The company is now working as a technical partner of the hypercar manufacturer McMurtry Automotive.
About:Energy is testing and modelling the battery pack for the production version of McMurtry’s Spéirling PURE hypercar, which set a speed record in trials at Goodwood Motor Circuit.
It has also developed a technology demonstrator for battery management systems with the support of STMicroelectronics, which enables companies to develop safe, efficient and cost-effective battery management systems in-house. The demonstrator won a global innovation award at the Plug and Play Expo2024.
Looking to the future, About:Energy is sponsoring more than 15 student teams in a Europe-wide competition in which teams design, build and race single-seater race cars. The company’s initiative Formula Student: Drive to Recharge aims to support the development of 1,500 battery engineers by 2030.
On how the funding and support of the Faraday Battery Challenge has helped his company, Kieran said: “Getting to lead a big Innovate UK project with a university like Imperial College London has opened us up to potential customers and investors. It allowed us to connect more closely into the Faraday Battery Challenge, which provided a huge amount of support in terms of business development, industry connections and market events.”
Celltris
This Bristol-based battery technology company is developing sodium-ion battery chemistry and assembly methods that will reduce costs by 40% and perform as well as lithium-ion battery cells using materials available in abundance all over the world.
Electric vehicles (EVs) will play a crucial role in achieving net zero. They can help improve local air quality and, when charged by renewable energy sources, they can reduce global emissions too.
A typical EV battery can contain hundreds of battery cells. Those cells currently make up much of the cost of the vehicle, and how well they perform is limited by the chemicals inside them. New technologies are being developed that use sodium (the same stuff that’s used to make table salt) rather than lithium to charge and discharge the battery. Sodium is cheaper, safer and better for the environment than lithium, which has to be mined.
Bristol battery technology company Celltris is using £800,000 of funding raised through Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships programme to develop both the sodium-based electrodes and the cell assembly techniques required to achieve these improvements to electric vehicle cells and reduce the cost of manufacturing them.
The company’s co-founder Sam Alexander said: “By developing new ways to combine chemistry with the mechanical design of the cells we can reduce the cost of the cell without reducing its performance. The technology we’re developing is 40% less expensive than lithium-ion cells, it uses abundant materials widely available globally and performs just as well as lithium-based solutions.”
Celltris has also re-engineered the battery terminals to make the connections between the electrodes inside the cell and the pack outside the cell as efficient and cheap as possible.
Sam said: “The project has given us a core technology in both cell chemistry and assembly that enables us to achieve high energy densities whilst slashing costs. It has helped us prove that our technology works, and now we are looking at how we can scale the innovations we’ve come up with and we are currently raising investment to do just that.”
About how Celltris’ involvement in Innovate UK’s Investor Partnerships programme has helped the company, Sam said: “Being match-funded, it allowed us to significantly extend our runway. We raised £750,000 through venture capital and had the £400,000 grant matched against it. To get them both together was incredibly helpful.” In total, the company has raised more than £1.3 million of funding so far.
MAT2BAT
Ansys and its project partners have developed a tool and database to help users explore new battery module designs.
The design and development of greener, better batteries is core to achieving the global drive towards electrification. However, battery cells, modules and packs are complex systems, leading to multiple challenges around interdependencies, materials and components.
In 2018, Granta Design (which in early 2019 became part of the engineering simulation and 3D design software company Ansys) joined forces with Imperial College, London and battery manufacturer Denchi Group to tackle these design issues. Funded by UK Research and Innovation via its Faraday Battery challenge, the year-long MAT2BAT project resulted in an early-stage practical battery module design tool and a database, both of which are fully integrated in the Ansys Granta education and commercial software packages.
Student engineers can learn about the key concepts of cell/module selection and design through Ansys Granta EduPack, the materials engineering software used by over 1,000 universities and colleges worldwide. The tool and data set help users understand design components and performance metrics, enabling them to explore relationships between battery module design and performance.
What this means is that technical professionals working in industry, such as engineers and designers, continue to build on this early introduction to design and can use the Ansys Granta Selector software to explore and compare multiple different design configurations, quickly and easily, for early stages of design and development.
Roger Barnett, senior product manager at Ansys, said using the tool and database in the preliminary design and development phase is beneficial to industry and to students, for several reasons.
Roger said: “Users can pick lots of different designs and explore them all at the same time, narrowing down the field of possible combinations. It is very easy and low cost to change things at the start of the design and development process. Towards the end of the process, there is much less flexibility for making changes and the costs are higher.”
Donna Dykeman, R&D manager at Ansys, shared that the tool and dataset are viewed as a quick analysis at the concept design phase prior to more detailed analysis by high-fidelity physics modelling and experimental testing.
Donna said: “From the MAT2BAT outcomes, the user is quickly informed of their design direction and can take the next step to perform detailed multi-physics-based modelling for electrochemical reactions, mechanical integrity, and fluid dynamics in Ansys Battery Modeling and Simulation Solutions. The wider business can gain the benefits of interdisciplinary concept-to-detailed design and advance from desktop evaluations to in-service control using Ansys solutions.”
MAT2BAT was a truly collaborative project, with Imperial College developing the design methodology, Ansys developing the software tool and database and Denchi Group helping with industrial models and user feedback. When the project ended in 2019, Ansys spent an additional year developing the tool and database and turning them into finished products.
Rob Davis, director of product management (Materials Business Unit) at Ansys said: “Batteries are complex systems with many design challenges. This UKRI-funded project was key to tackling these challenges. Our users can rapidly explore new designs and optimise their products for an electrified future.”
Graphene Star
Replacing the metal foil used in current collectors inside lithium ion batteries with polymers could reduce the weight of batteries while boosting their power and energy density and creating a reliable supply chain in the UK.
Current collectors act as a bridge between a battery’s electrodes and the device it is connected to, transporting electrical current from the battery to the device. They are essential components of lithium ion batteries, but the UK has no domestic suppliers of current collectors, which are made of copper or aluminium foil and have to be imported from Japan or China. They are also expensive and heavy, contributing up to 30% of a battery’s weight and limiting its potential energy and power density.
Advanced graphene and graphite materials company Graphene Star played a critical role in a Faraday Battery Challenge-funded project to look at the feasibility of developing a lightweight and low-cost current collector that uses a polymer instead of metal foil. The project, CONDUCTOR, has shown it is feasible to develop a polymer current collector that not only reduces weight but also achieves conductivity on par with aluminium and copper.
Graphene Star’s CEO Marina Starkova said: “Our role in CONDUCTOR was to develop a composite of graphene and carbon black particles, which could be used to produce polymers that would offer the same conductivity as metal foil.”
As well as helping to reduce the weight and cost of batteries, there is an environmental benefit to Graphene Star’s composite material: the company’s graphene is made by using raw materials without any harmful chemicals, pollution or emissions.
The composite Graphene Star created could also be used to develop high-performance coatings with a range of potential uses outside of the project’s initial scope. For example, lightweight, non-magnetic coatings to shield against electromagnetic radiation in electric vehicles and to protect spacecraft and sensitive equipment; ultra-lightweight polymer antennas for mobile phones and RFID systems; and polymer-based conductive connectors for aviation, which could create new opportunities in printed microelectronics manufacturing.
Marina said: “We’ve continued to collaborate with the University of Warwick since the project closed, exploring the properties of the carbon composite. We are looking at applications such as hydrogen fuel cells and redox flow batteries, and have even begun developing new silicon-graphite composites for use in lithium battery anodes.”
The project, a feasibility study that also involved Rapid Powders, Global Nano Network, Euriscus and the University of Warwick, provided funding that assisted Graphene Star to upgrade its production capabilities to manufacture the new composite on an industrial scale. This has enabled the company to expand its partnerships to advance the production of highly conductive inks and polymer shielding coatings. It retrained two of its technical staff to operate the new machinery.
Graphene Star was in the process of fundraising when the CONDUCTOR project was awarded a £516,507 grant from Innovate UK. News of the award helped the company raise £1 million of investment, which Marina said was more than they had expected.
She said: “The equipment we were able to buy with UKRI’s support has given us the capability to produce graphene composites with precisely defined graphene particle sizes. We have enhanced the productivity of our equipment for manufacturing graphene and graphite materials with diverse properties, while our advanced equipment has enabled us to develop a unique single-stage process for producing highly conductive composites for various applications.”
LIBRIS
Tri-Wall UK has been a major partner in LIBRIS, a collaborative project to improve the safety of lithium-ion batteries.
LIBRIS (Lithium-Ion Battery Research in Safety) was a project supported by the Faraday Battery Challenge to develop new technologies and methodologies to inform and improve the safety in design, testing, transportation and use of electric vehicle batteries.
Packaging specialist Tri-Wall UK was one of the project partners. It was involved in the 21-month project to develop evidence-based principles for the safe and efficient handling, packaging and transportation of lithium-ion cells and batteries.
Mike Valentine, projects lead of battery transport solutions at Tri-Wall UK, said packaging regulations are struggling to keep abreast of industry innovations:
“From a packaging perspective, the current regulations do not adequately address safety issues that need to be considered when storing or moving lithium-ion batteries. Technology is moving faster than regulations can keep up with. Should someone want to store or move batteries, there’s insufficient accessible guidance to indicate that they need to consider the risk of a thermal runaway event and provide appropriate mitigation materials and methodology.”
A thermal runaway event is a rapid increase in temperature that can occur under certain conditions in a battery cell. Thermal runaway can spread to neighbouring cells and initiate an adverse event in the entire battery pack. This is called thermal runaway propagation and can trigger a fire or explosion in the pack.
During the project, Tri-Wall UK sourced a sustainable and fully recyclable thermal mitigation material that contains the effects of lithium-ion thermal runaway.
The LIBRIS project was a collaborative effort involving materials-science development, live-cell destructive testing analysis, and packaging development to ensure product safety.
As a result of the grant funding of £4.5 million, Tri-Wall UK has developed a new range of environmentally sustainable packaging that is designed specifically for lithium-ion cells, batteries, modules, full electric vehicle packs and static storage solutions.
The company is securing global patents for its new products, all of which were developed with the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre, are assembly line ready and were tested with Tri-Wall’s project partners the UK Health and Safety Executive and WMG at the University of Warwick.
Mike said despite the pandemic, Tri-Wall UK met its LIBRIS objectives, on time and budget:
“We wanted to get an understanding of the issues so that we could write clear packaging definitions and produce a product-specific range to meet that. We wanted to inform industry on potential issues and what needed to be done to mitigate them, so they could responsibly store and move batteries.”
LIBRIS resulted in the creation of six new posts within Tri-Wall UK. It also boosted the company’s capabilities, approach to R&D, product development and business processes.
Other project partners were science-based technology company 3M, Jaguar Land Rover, lithium-ion battery and charger supplier Denchi Power, battery management systems specialist Potenza Technology and Lifeline Fire & Safety Systems.
CAM-EV
A new method for recycling the critical minerals inside electric vehicle batteries could help reduce carbon emissions while upcycling battery waste and boosting the resilience of the UK’s supply chain.
Almost 14 million electric vehicles (EVs) were registered globally in 2023. That’s good for reducing emissions, especially in urban areas affected by poor air quality. But a different environmental problem awaits when these vehicles’ batteries reach the end of their lives: what to do with the waste.
Based on one estimate, that single year’s supply of EV batteries could produce 3.5 million tonnes of waste. That’s 7 million cubic metres – enough to fill at least two O2 Arenas.
The CAM-EV project, led by clean technology company Altilium, is exploring how the critical metals inside this waste could be recycled back into new battery cells.
The project, a collaboration with Imperial College London, is focused on optimising a new method developed by Altilium to process battery cell e-waste known as black mass. This type of waste is produced by crushing and shredding dismantled end-of-life battery cells so that the critical metals can be extracted for reuse.
Altilium has developed a novel method of hydrometallurgy (dissolving metals in an aqueous solution) to recover the material needed to produce a high-quality cathode-active material (CAM). The results so far have been encouraging. On the cathode side, CAM-EV has managed to recover 97% of the lithium in lithium ion phosphate (LFP) cells.
The new hydrometallurgical process – unlike traditional pyrometallurgical processes, which incinerate materials – was also found to recover substantial amounts of graphite, which is used in the manufacturing of anodes. Since the UK has no domestic source of graphite and geopolitical changes could affect existing supply chains, this could provide a boost to the resilience of the UK’s battery industry.
As Altilium’s president and COO Christian Marston said, there is also an environmental benefit to the new method: “Overall, the process we have developed results in more than 60% lower carbon emissions compared to existing, primary supply chains and it reduces the need for mining that can be harmful to the environment.”
Altilium has plans to build a mega-scale battery recycling facility in Teesside by 2027. The site, Altilium Clean Technology 4 (ACT4), will process high volumes of end-of-life batteries and gigafactory scrap.
It will be the fourth site the company has opened since 2022, when Altilium opened ACT1, a lithium-ion battery recycling centre in Devon. A new mini commercial plant (ACT2) is currently under construction, also in Devon, and is expected to begin processing batteries later this year. ACT 3 is an existing SXEW hydrometallurgical plant in Bulgaria, which will be retrofitted to recycle battery black mass. In the past year, the company has doubled its staff and hopes to have created up to 400 high-value jobs by 2030.
Christian said Innovate UK’s support through the Faraday Battery Challenge has been important to the project and Altilium achieving their goals. “The funding supported us in our growth. It has been transformational, allowing us to develop and scale up the green processing technologies that are needed for the net zero challenge. It derisks Altilium for outside investors, and it’s well received [by investors].”
In addition to its work with the Faraday Battery Challenge, Altilium has received funding from the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK for a number of innovative projects, including a £30 million collaborative R&D project led by Nissan (APC23) and a new partnership with JLR to produce and validate battery cells from recycled material, through the Advanced Route to Market Demonstrator competition.
Following a Series A round of funding led by SQM Lithium Ventures that secured $12 million, Altilium is now closing a series B round, which will help raise the funds required to further scale up its operations.
SUNRISE
With funding from the Faraday Battery Challenge this project has developed a new anode material based on silicon that could dramatically increase the range of electric vehicles.
It’s long been the holy grail of battery design: more energy, but with less bulk and weight. Currently electric vehicles are limited in their range, largely because of the shortcomings of existing batteries – they don’t store enough energy for long trips, and if they did they would be too big and heavy to fit in a vehicle.
The challenge, then, is to redesign the materials inside batteries, which determine how much energy can be stored in them. And with lithium-ion batteries, the key components that determine size are the electrodes: the anode and the cathode. To date, anodes have generally been made of graphite, a form of carbon. But a project funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Faraday Battery Challenge has developed a replacement material containing silicon, meaning that a battery cell can store up to 50% more energy by volume.
Dr. Bill Macklin is chief engineer at battery materials specialist Nexeon Limited, which has been leading the SUNRISE project. Working with polymer company Synthomer and University College London (SUNRISE stands for Synthomer, UCL and Nexeon’s Rapid Improvement in the Storage of Energy) Nexeon has developed a new material that is designed to be a ‘drop-in’ replacement for graphite.
“We’ve known for a long time that tackling the anode in lithium-ion batteries could be the key to reducing their weight,” said Bill, “And we’ve been working on introducing silicon as a potential anode material since 2006. The challenge has been to find the precise form of material that can provide the long cycle life that a vehicle needs (being able to be charged at least a thousand times). And that has the potential to be made on a very large scale, for millions of electric vehicles, cheaply enough to make them viable.”
The project showed early on the potential of the new material, testing it and demonstrating that it has a good life cycle. Having established proof of concept, the project also developed large-scale processes to manufacture the material in significant quantities.
The project partners have made good use of the infrastructure provided by the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre in Coventry, which has enabled samples of the silicon material to be produced and tested in lithium-ion cells. Early market engagement has also been an important element. From the beginning, the project was thinking about what potential customers need, providing them with samples that meet their specifications, and then using their feedback in the further development of the material.
Following the conclusion of the SUNRISE project in 2021, work is now under way in the UK, Europe, South Korea and Japan, with customers evaluating the potential of silicon-based anodes to produce batteries that pack more punch. And not just in the automotive industry: they are also being used in consumer electronics, and even in power tools.
For Nexeon, the new material is now a cornerstone of its forward business strategy. The company’s expansion in 2022 involved 50 new hirings. In August 2023 Nexeon secured a site for its first commercial volume silicon anode material plant in South Korea. The company secured a binding long-term supply of monosilane (a critical raw material required to produce its silicon anode materials) through an agreement with OCI. Nexeon is scheduled to begin supplying commercial material in 2025, initially fulfilling a binding supply agreement the company has signed with Panasonic.
WIZer Battery
A project led by WAE has developed battery technologies that combine high energy with high power and enabled the company to set up a new battery intelligence division serving automotive manufacturers, battery asset financiers and fleet operators.
The ideal rechargeable battery would be able to store plenty of energy while being able to deliver consistently high levels of power when needed. Until now manufacturers have been able to target either power or energy when designing their batteries, not both.
Imagine hailing an eVTOL (electrical vertical landing and take-off aircraft) for a congestion-avoiding hop across town. You would want enough energy to be able to reach your destination and enough power on demand at journey’s end in the event of an aborted landing, which is difficult to deliver because cell power capability drops off at low states of charge.
This potentially life-saving combination of high energy and high power is exactly what WAE and its partners on the WIZer Battery project have achieved. The project involved a hybrid battery comprised of two different types of lithium ion cells, which in combination provide high energy and high power.
Imperial College London and the expertise of the Faraday Institution’s Multi-scale Modelling was used to inform a state of the art battery modelling system, able to analyse multiple competing battery models running at the same time. This required high-powered processing and machine learning provided by Codeplay Software to get the best from the hardware.
Rob Millar, WAE’s head of electrical, said: “The project set out to model what was going on inside the electronics within the battery. But what we wanted to know was whether we could collect data from the battery in real time, or real-ish time, and then transmit that off board, and what level of data would we need to understand the battery at a distance. The advantage of being able to do that is, in an off-board world, we can take an enormous amount of battery data and start to look at it in a much bigger way than we can in the on-board world, where we are constrained by storage and processing time.”
That ability has led to WAE setting up a new battery intelligence division, Elysia, which employs 25 staff and offers battery management software as well as a cloud platform. It enables automotive OEMs, fleet operators and battery asset financiers to access battery data and to manage, optimise and enhance battery performance during a vehicle’s life.
The technology developed by the project has a number of potential applications as shown by the diversity of projects WAE is working on from supplying the Gen 3 Formula E battery to partnering with Fortescue Metals Group to develop a new battery system to power electric mining haul trucks. Rob said: “We’ve got this in probably 30 or 40 different projects already, possibly more.”
Timothy Engstrom, manager of Advanced Battery Technologies, Battery Intelligence at WAE, oversees Elysia. He said: “WIZer was foundational in developing the approaches to physics-informed and health-adaptive battery management algorithms which Elysia has commercialised. Through collaboration across industry and academia, Elysia has brought to market real-world performance benefits based on cutting-edge industry-relevant battery research.”
AMPLiFII
This project is developing a sustainable supply of battery packs for electric and hybrid vehicles.
In 2017, the Office for Low Emissions Vehicles granted £9.98 million of funding to a two-year project called AMPLiFII (Automated Module to pack Pilot Line for Industrial Innovation). The aim of the project was to manufacture battery packs for use in hybrid and electric cars and to build a stronger supply chain. It was so successful that it led to the AMPLiFII-2 project, supported by UK Research and Innovation via the Faraday Battery challenge and led by one of the original project partners, the engineering consultancy Delta.
This second project ran from 2018 to 2020, taking the manufacturing technology developed during AMPLiFII and adapting it for implementation by the project partners. Those partners were the high-performance car manufacturer Ariel, printed circuit technology specialist Trackwise, battery specialist Potenza, Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), JCB, bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis and Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG).
The project had three distinct goals. First, to develop a scalable battery module/pack solution for the partners. Second, to develop module-to-pack integration methodologies. This included: developing high power modules that would accelerate charging times, investigating module design and process to reduce costs and enable scaling to high volumes, and developing battery management system (BMS) hardware and software improvements. The third goal was to scale up the manufacturing capability at Delta for commercial purposes. Since the project ended, Delta was acquired by the automotive engineering company Cosworth, becoming its electrification arm.
According to James Arkell, head of programmes at Delta, AMPLiFII-2 helped in the drive towards electrification, particularly in the premium vehicle market.
James said: “Electrification is coming for the niche manufacturers as well as the original equipment manufacturers [OEMs] now. Some of the OEMs came out with products early on but a lot of the niche manufacturers or premium brands were holding off until the performance improved and the costs reduced. The premium OEMs want to provide products that perform higher or faster or for longer periods than other products.”
Many of the early electric and hybrid vehicles were limited in their range and charging rates, something AMPLiFII wanted to overcome.
The project has achieved successful outcomes for all of the project partners, with requirements from each sector incorporated into module and battery designs. Delta, Potenza and Trackwise benefited from a significant investment in equipment and facility upgrades. For Ariel, it led to vehicle developments, including alternative battery casing materials. Potenza’s BMS hardware was validated to automotive standards and the project identified next-generation enhancements.
And a detailed module characterization and validation programme undertaken by Delta, WMG and JLR will feed learning into future OEM programmes, benefitting industry, the environment and society more widely.
James explained: “We have opened up the electrification opportunities to lots of other manufacturers. Not just the larger OEMs, but also smaller companies. This project has opened up the market.”
Li4UK
With support from UKRI’s Faraday Battery Challenge, a project in Cornwall could be supplying a significant amount of the UK’s future demand for lithium required for electric vehicle batteries.
Cornwall could be producing a significant portion of the UK’s lithium requirement for electric vehicle (EV) batteries within five years, thanks to a venture supported by UKRI through the Faraday Battery Challenge.
Cornish Lithium was part of a £500,000 feasibility project, ‘Securing Domestic Lithium Supply Chain for UK’ (Li4UK), led by mining consultant Wardell Armstrong International and involving the Natural History Museum’s advanced lithium laboratories.
For EV batteries and energy storage alone, Europe will need up to 18 times more lithium by 2030. However, there is currently no commercial battery-grade lithium production in Europe, a fact reflected in the EU adding lithium to its ‘critical raw materials’ list in September 2020.
In one strand of the Li4UK project Cornish Lithium assessed the potential to produce lithium from geothermal waters across the UK and found that Cornwall has the highest potential for this. The company is targeting lithium production from lithium-enriched geothermal waters that circulate at high temperatures in fault lines deep within Cornwall’s granite geology.
Cornish Lithium has proved it is possible to drill boreholes into sub-surface structures containing lithium-enriched waters and to extract lithium using direct lithium extraction technologies. The company has also demonstrated that the lithium-enriched waters contain significant amounts of potentially saleable heat energy, which could be used by local industry to lower its carbon footprint. Once the lithium has been extracted, the water will be returned to the granite or sold as useable water for irrigation.
Jeremy Wrathall, CEO and founder of Cornish Lithium, said: “Producing lithium from geothermal waters is particularly attractive because it has a very low environmental impact.”
In a first for the UK, Cornish Lithium has built a pilot plant at its geothermal lithium extraction facility on an industrial site near Redruth. The company is now investigating the possibility of building a demonstration plant nearby.
Jeremy said: “Following our success with our 2,000 metres-deep hole at Twelveheads, we see an exciting future for lithium extraction from geothermal waters across Cornwall. We envision multiple small modular extraction facilities, which could generate 50-100 jobs.”
Cornish Lithium is also making progress with its Trelavour hard rock project where lithium will be extracted from lithium-enriched granite. The project could generate up to 300 jobs in an area in need of long-term careers for young people.
Jeremy said: “The UK economy is estimated to require up to 80,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate by 2035 and we believe that we could supply over 10,000 tonnes by 2027 from our Trelavour project, with more coming from the geothermal waters projects across Cornwall.”
Cornish Lithium was awarded £111,000 for Li4UK by UKRI via the Faraday Battery Challenge and received an additional £10,000 continuity grant to cover COVID-19 disruption. The company also won £3.9 million for the GeoCubed pilot plant project from the UK government’s Getting Building Fund, with Cornwall LEP as a partner.
In August 2023 the company secured a £53.6 million initial investment from a group of investors led by the UK Infrastructure Bank alongside The Energy & Minerals Group (EMG) and TechMet. Jeremy said: “The support we received from UKRI and Innovate UK accelerated our progress towards being ready for external investment from these major institutional funders.”
I-CoBat
New ways of cooling batteries like those explored in this Faraday-funded project could encourage more of us to drive electric vehicles.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have made big strides in recent years, both in their design and in the charging stations that are available for them. So what’s stopping us all from going electric?
When asked, people most frequently raise concerns over the time it takes for EVs to charge. We all have an idea of how quickly our petrol cars take to fill up, and until EVs’ charging times get close to this, they will always be at a disadvantage.
Aiming to do something about this is the Immersion Cooled Battery (I-CoBat) project, which is supported through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund as part of the Faraday Battery Challenge.
Battery cooling has long been a stumbling block on the road to faster charging of EVs: fast charging can indeed reduce waiting times for EV drivers, but it makes batteries hotter than they get under normal driving conditions. Getting too hot could mean batteries ageing prematurely, or failing altogether.
I-CoBat has been testing the viability of new cooling techniques for EV batteries. The company leading the project, M&I Materials Ltd, had already developed an environmentally-friendly synthetic liquid called MIVOLT, which it knew had potential for efficiently cooling batteries through immersion. The problem was the amount of liquid that this would take and the weight of that liquid.
During the I-CoBat project, M&I has teamed up with engineering consultancy Ricardo Ltd, which has designed an innovative module that sits on an EV battery like a jacket and directs the coolant only to where it is needed, meaning much less liquid is required.
A large part of I-CoBat has involved simulations and tests to see how well these methods perform. Tests carried out by project partner WMG at the University of Warwick have shown that the new immersion cooling techniques enable EVs to charge 43% quicker. Just as importantly, tests carried out at the University of Liverpool showed no unwanted reactions between the MIVOLT liquid and the internal chemistry of batteries.
For M&I, the I-CoBat project has already led to further collaborations with EV manufacturers, who are interested in making immersion cooling work with their own batteries.
In January 2021, it was announced that MIVOLT would be used by California-based mobility specialist Faraday Future, in the battery pack it has developed.
M&I is working with Norton Motorcycles and the Advanced Propulsion Centre to produce an electric superbike. The outputs of the project are also helping the company to move into the aerospace sector: through Project InCEPTion M&I is helping to develop a propulsion unit for electric aircraft.
This has enabled the company to grow its MIVOLT technical team, adding two new engineers and a technical operator to the M&I staff. M&I has recently expanded the capabilities of its Trafford Park site to include a new materials compatibility lab, battery test lab and battery abuse testing lab.
M&I’s technical director, Mark Lashbrook, said: “As an SME, working with the support of the ISCF and being able to use the facilities and research know-how of our partners has meant that we could get much quicker to where we wanted to be. The opportunity to work with renowned organisations like Ricardo and WMG has really raised our profile, too.
“I-CoBat has shown there are no show-stoppers that would prevent these techniques from being used. With immersion cooling, we can get charging down to less than seven minutes for 200 miles in range: enough for you to plug in your EV, go and have a coffee, and have enough charge to be well on your way.”
Echion
With continued support from the Faraday Battery Challenge, this Cambridge-based company is developing new materials for fast-charging, long-life batteries, making industrial and commercial electric vehicles more viable and effective.
Batteries are a cornerstone technology that will help reduce carbon emissions in the transportation sector. To drive wider adoption of electric vehicles, batteries need to be made smaller and lighter, more cost-effective and reliable, and quicker to charge. Significant improvements can be achieved by redesigning a few key battery components.
UK company Echion Technologies has focused on one element of the lithium-ion battery: the negative electrode, or anode. As the mainstay technology for electric vehicles, today’s lithium-ion batteries have limited capability to safely and repeatedly fast charge, largely due to the material that battery anodes are made from.
Since spinning out of the University of Cambridge in 2017 to commercialise fast-charging battery materials, Echion has received support across several collaborative projects with UKRI and an Industry Fellowship from the Faraday Institution. This has supported the launch of its niobium-based XNO® battery materials, which are now commercially available.
Echion’s CTO, Dr Alex Groombridge, said: “When you have a radical new idea in the batteries sector, getting it to the point where customers will buy it at volume takes a lot of up-front investment, which involves risk. UKRI’s support helped us to de-risk the process and build relationships with organisations we might not otherwise have worked with.”
Some of the UKRI-supported projects have involved taking forward research at a very early stage. In one project Echion joined forces with electric bus powertrain supplier Vantage Power to replace standard negative electrode materials with the first-generation XNO® material that can store charge more effectively, without safety concerns or long-term battery degradation. It took ideas from the lab up to functioning prototype cells which were tested under application duty cycles by industry partners. Testing has shown that XNO® could enable long-range electric buses to be recharged five times faster than at present and identified technical improvements, which have since been incorporated into the current generation of XNO®.
The Cathode and Anode Supply Chain for Advanced Demonstrator (CASCADE) project took the latest generation of XNO® technology and enabled the development of three formats of demonstrator cells. The first were 21700-format cells which exhibited excellent low temperature performance down to -30oC. The second were tabless 4690-format cells that demonstrated >300 Wh/L energy densities and an 8.5-minute fast charge/discharge. Finally, the third demonstrator comprised small, 1 Ah 10C fast charging and discharging pouch cells, which were successfully certified to UN38.3 standards.
The Faraday Institution Industry Fellowship between Echion and Professor Peter Slater at the University of Birmingham has identified two new XNO® phases (and filed one patent), including assessment of their performance and in-depth materials characterisation. These have been taken as new potential products into Echion’s new product development cycle, where they are being assessed for commercial viability and manufacturability.
For Alex, the importance of Echion’s products lies in enabling electrification of e-mobility applications that are poorly serviced with existing offerings, like graphite-based cells.
He said: “Our technology is well suited to the railway system, for example, much of which still runs on diesel. There are significant environmental benefits in going electric, but there are performance and cost benefits too – we estimate that you can decrease running costs by at least 20% over the lifetime of a train versus a graphite solution. And there are ethical issues around most battery raw materials, but XNO® uses niobium that is sustainably mined and is abundant.”
With support from the Faraday Battery Challenge, Echion is growing fast. The company has gone from a team of two to more than 40 staff, with a plan to double this in the next three years. Recent upgrades to its facilities have enabled a tripling of its floorspace, which includes a pilot-scale production facility, characterisation facilities and an electrochemistry lab.
