Fully automated laboratory in the field of battery research

Ana­lyz­ing thou­sands of inter­faces, build­ing bat­ter­ies around the clock, autonomous­ly eval­u­at­ing the results with the help of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI), and then imme­di­ate­ly plan­ning the next exper­i­ment: A new facil­i­ty at the Clus­ter of Excel­lence POLiS han­dles mate­ri­als devel­op­ment ful­ly auto­mat­i­cal­ly and dig­i­tal­ly. The autonomous research lab­o­ra­to­ry was devel­oped in a coop­er­a­tion between the Karl­sruhe Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy (KIT), the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ulm, and the Helmholtz Insti­tute Ulm (HIU) and has now gone into oper­a­tion. There­sia Bauer, Baden-Würt­tem­berg’s Min­is­ter of Sci­ence, was present at the launch.

New types of pow­er­ful and sus­tain­able bat­ter­ies are need­ed for the trans­porta­tion and ener­gy tran­si­tion. This is a major chal­lenge, because with cur­rent meth­ods it takes decades from the idea to the fin­ished prod­uct. With a high-tech facil­i­ty now com­plet­ed at POLiS, it should be much faster in the future. The light­house project was devel­oped in the POLiS clus­ter of excel­lence, in which the insti­tute is work­ing togeth­er with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ulm on the bat­ter­ies of the future.

“The fund­ing of this new mate­ri­als devel­op­ment plat­form has cre­at­ed a research infra­struc­ture that is unique in the world. We hope it will pro­vide a sig­nif­i­cant boost to research into ener­gy stor­age sys­tems, which are essen­tial in the trans­for­ma­tion of our ener­gy sys­tem and our mobil­i­ty. At the same time, the fund­ing has enabled us to recruit Pro­fes­sor Helge Stein as a cre­ative and enter­pris­ing mind for our team in Ulm.”

- There­sia Bauer, Min­is­ter of Science

World’s first fully integrated platform for accelerated research on electrochemical energy storage

Helge Stein, tenure-track pro­fes­sor and research area spokesper­son, explains the ben­e­fits of the facil­i­ty: “We are now able to syn­the­size and assem­ble bat­ter­ies and their indi­vid­ual com­po­nents in an auto­mat­ed way, ini­ti­ate a mea­sure­ment and eval­u­ate it in a ful­ly auto­mat­ed man­ner. Based on the data, the AI-sup­port­ed facil­i­ty can even decide which exper­i­ment to per­form next.” With his research group, Stein devel­oped the under­ly­ing com­bi­na­to­r­i­al mate­r­i­al syn­the­sis, high-through­put char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, and data min­ing tech­niques using AI meth­ods in exper­i­ment eval­u­a­tion and plan­ning. The facil­i­ty, named PLACES/R (Plat­form for Accel­er­at­ed Elec­tro­chem­i­cal Ener­gy Stor­age Research), rep­re­sents the world’s first ful­ly inte­grat­ed plat­form for accel­er­at­ed elec­tro­chem­i­cal ener­gy stor­age research.

New paradigm for battery material development

Bat­tery research is char­ac­ter­ized by the search for the ide­al com­bi­na­tion of mate­ri­als, their com­po­si­tion and process tech­nolo­gies. How­ev­er, test­ing all pos­si­ble vari­a­tions with all mate­ri­als would take mil­len­nia using clas­si­cal meth­ods. “Our facil­i­ty can test sev­er­al hun­dred such vari­a­tions a day. This is rough­ly equiv­a­lent to the aver­age life’s work of a researcher,” says Stein. In addi­tion to the accel­er­a­tion through automa­tion, the algo­rithms and AI can achieve an addi­tion­al opti­miza­tion that is ten times faster, and thus bring promis­ing bat­tery con­cepts to mar­ket even faster and more cost-effectively.

The new research facil­i­ty is embed­ded in a Euro­pean frame­work: The data col­lect­ed from all areas of the bat­tery devel­op­ment cycle will be shared with 34 insti­tu­tions from 15 coun­tries in the BIG-MAP project of the Euro­pean research ini­tia­tive BATTERY2030+. “The ful­ly auto­mat­ed lab will not only enable us and our Euro­pean part­ners to devel­op com­po­nents for new bat­ter­ies much faster. It will also ensure that bat­ter­ies can be man­u­fac­tured at such low cost that it will be even more attrac­tive in the future to store elec­tric­i­ty from the sun and wind, for exam­ple, in bat­ter­ies,” says Pro­fes­sor Max­i­m­il­ian Ficht­ner, HIU’s exec­u­tive director.