At the 12th edition of the annual International Conference on Advanced Lithium Batteries for Automobile Applications (ABAA-12), held in October 2019 in Ulm, Germany, policy makers from China, Germany, Japan, the European Commission and the USA provided an in-depth description of their respective visions on how to bring forward battery technology.
These visions are now summarized in a Perspective article on Journal of Power Sources reporting the R&D trends presented at the conference and the current penetration of electric vehicles in the mass market:
“Bringing forward the development of battery cells for automotive applications: Perspective of R&D activities in China, Japan, the EU and the USA” (The manuscript is presently accessible free of charge until May 19, 2020).
Dr. Margret Wohlfahrt-Mehrens (ZSW), Prof. Stefano Passerini (HIU) and Dr. Khalil Amine (IALB/Argonne National Laboratory, USA) headed the conference.
Speakers included the renowned chemist M. Stanley Whittingham, who is regarded as one of the fathers of lithium-ion technology and who learned of his Nobel Prize award whilst in Ulm.
In order to develop future batteries, partners from science and industry from all over Europe have launched the BATTERY 2030+ research initiative. A roadmap specifies the milestones: a platform for material development using artificial intelligence (AI), networked sensors and self-healing technology for batteries as well as sustainable manufacturing and recycling processes. The Helmholtz Institute Ulm, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the University of Ulm and the Zentrum für Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) are involved in the consortium via the research platform CELEST.
Changes towards a climate-neutral society require fundamental transformations in the way we generate, use and store energy. The European research initiative BATTERY 2030+ aims at high-performance battery storage that is sustainable, safe and inexpensive at the same time. The participating research institutions and companies have now published a roadmap that defines both the properties of future batteries and measures to accelerate development. Three main research areas are identified: “We want to speed up the search for new materials and the right material mix, get new functions on the way and establish manufacturing and recycling concepts,” says Professor Maximilian Fichtner, Deputy Director at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm and spokesman for the Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage Ulm-Karlsruhe (CELEST). “With BATTERY 2030+ we are now bringing together expertise in the respective sub-areas across Europe and working in a coordinated manner. This gives us the opportunity to be at the forefront of battery development worldwide, also in competition with the United States and Asia. “
Accelerated material development with artificial intelligence
In order to learn how certain materials behave and how they have to be handled in order to produce certain properties, Battery 2030+ has to build a globally unique High-Throughput system (MAP, Materials Acceleration Platform). The combination of automated synthesis, characterization and material modeling as well as data mining techniques and AI in test evaluation and planning should significantly accelerate the development of new battery materials. Building on this common platform, BATTERY 2030+ will start analyzing the properties of material interfaces, such as the interface between the electrode and electrolyte or between active material and various additives. This “interface genome” (BIG, Battery Interface Genome) is intended to help researchers develop promising approaches for new, high-performance batteries.
Intelligent functionalities and a sustainable development process
External factors such as extreme temperatures, mechanical stress, excessive performance during operation or simply aging over time have a negative impact on the performance of a battery. The researchers at BATTERY 2030+ have therefore decided to jointly develop intelligent and networked sensor concepts that will in future be able to observe chemical and electrochemical reactions directly in the battery cell. You may discover early stages of battery failure or unwanted side reactions that lead to battery aging. In addition, the batteries of the next generation are to be equipped with “self-healing powers”: damage inside a battery that would otherwise lead to battery failure can be compensated for by skillful use of materials. Sensors and self-healing should make batteries even more reliable and durable in the future. Used cells of high quality are also attractive for a second use. In addition, Battery 2030+ already pursues the goal of maximum sustainability during development. Parameters such as resource-saving manufacturability, recyclability, critical raw materials and toxicity flow directly into the algorithms of the MAP-based development of new battery concepts.
The first projects from the roadmap for BATTERY 2030+ have already been approved by the EU and can now start. CELEST is a key player in the project for accelerated material development, modeling and data evaluation using AI and the associated autonomous robotics.
The roadmap: https://battery2030.eu/research/roadmap/
About the BATTERY 2030+ consortium
In addition to KIT and the University of Ulm, the BATTERY 2030+ consortium includes five universities: the University of Uppsala (coordinator), the Polytechnic Institute of Turin, the Technical University of Denmark, the Free University of Amsterdam and the University of Münster; several research centers: the French Research Center for Alternative Energy and Nuclear Energy CEA, the French National Center for Scientific Research CNRS, the Research Center Jülich, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Fundacion Cidetec, the National Institute for Chemistry Slovenia, the Organization for Applied and Technical Research Norway; as well as the industry associations EMIRI, EASE and RECHARGE and the Absiskey company. The consortium receives support from official European and national bodies, including ALISTORE ERI, EERA, EIT InnoEnergy, EIT RawMaterials, EARPA, EUROBAT, EGVI, CLEPA, EUCAR, KLIB, RS2E, from the Swedish Center for Electromobility, from PolStorEn, ENEA, CIC energigune, IMEC and the Tyndall National Institute.
More information: www.battery2030.eu
About research platform CELEST
The research platform CELEST (Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage Ulm & Karlsruhe) was founded in 2018 by the partners KIT, University of Ulm and the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW) for strategic cooperation and is one of the largest in international comparison Battery research activities. 45 working groups from 29 institutes of the KIT, the University of Ulm and the ZSW bring their complementary expertise to the platform CELEST – from basic research to practical development and technology transfer. CELEST is active in three research fields: lithium-ion technology, energy storage beyond lithium, and alternative techniques for electrochemical energy storage and conversion.
Further information: www.celest.de
The first online conference “European Perspectives on Batteries of the Future” (May 25/26, 2020) of EU battery initiative “BATTERY 2030+” turned out to be much larger than planned: Temporarily, around 750 participants simultaneously followed the conference video stream. The event was previously designed for only around 100 attendees.
Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, the 17 speakers switched to video-communication from their offices or home instead. All participants were able to contribute questions and comments on individual presentations and lectures at any time.
Christian Punckt, Managing Director of the Cluster of Excellence “Post-Lithium-Storage” (POLiS) and organizer of the online conference, emphasized the unexpected attention of the conference: “Without exaggeration we can say that there are over 1,000 registered participants and the simultaneous presence of 750 participants was the largest online battery conference ever.”
Scientists, politicians and journalists from all over the world watched the lecture program. “We had some representatives of the EU Commission among us, and even though the vast majority of the participants came from universities, the industry was also well represented,” Punckt emphasized.
The conference was organized by the “Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage Ulm-Karlsruhe” (CELEST). It provided an overview of the research work carried out in Europe in connection with the newly introduced BATTERY 2030+ roadmap. Its purpose was to use the scientific discussions within the BATTERY 2030+ community as the basis for the next phase, the starting signal as a large-scale research initiative.
Deputy director of the HIU, Prof. Maximilian Fichtner, moderated the conference. In addition, the two HIU researchers Helge Stein and Marcel Weil presented their research.
The conference covered all current areas of battery research. “From state-of-the art activities on theoretical modeling, synthesis, analytics, and manufacturing and technology assessment up to paradigm-changing new Activities such as autonomous robots with machine learning for the materials acceleration platform”, there is already a profound basis for every research area of the BATTERY2030+ initiative, Fichtner explained.
BATTERY 2030+ is the large-scale, long-term European research initiative with the vision of inventing the sustainable batteries of the future to enable Europe to achieve the goals of a climate-neutral society as set out in the European Green Deal.
The Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage Ulm-Karlsruhe (CELEST) held its first web-based science conference from May 25th to 26th, 2020 to discuss prospects for future batteries in Europe.
On the 25th-26th The first web conference “European Perspectives on Batteries of the Future” took place in May 2020. (BATTERY 2030+)
Conference Program and further details
The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has appointed Dr.-Ing. Helge S. Stein from Caltech (California Institute of Technology) to a tenure-track professorship at its Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU). Stein and his research group will research at Cluster of Excellence POLiS and teach at the Institute of Physical Chemistry. The tenure track concept is adapted from the American education system and is intended to facilitate the path to a professorship and make the German appointment system more competitive internationally.
Helge Stein and his team will deploy a system capable of autonomous material synthesis, characterization, where data mining techniques artificial intelligence (AI) will efficiently plan experiments and aid in their evaluation. This new paradigm for battery research will greatly accelerate the pace of research towards new and highest-performing battery materials. Battery research is characterized by the search for the ideal combination of materials and processes, such as heating, cooling or mixing. Trying all possible variations would require thousands of years using conventional methods. Stein and his colleagues in Ulm will employ several robots that are able to test several thousand variations per day. This corresponds roughly to the average life’s work of a researcher and will generate an enormous amount of information. With the help of algorithms and AI, the quality and information content of the robot’s measurements are evaluated autonomously. A central AI decision maker produces predictions and then suggests the optimal follow-up experiment. This method adds to the already extreme acceleration of research and was shown to be capable of an up to 30 times more rapid optimization than traditional trial and error.
Helge Stein was born in 1988 in Hamburg and grew up in Lüneburg. In 2008 he began studying physics at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen. He wrote his bachelor thesis on artificial photosynthesison manganates to produce “solar fuels”. His master thesis dealt with the construction of a high-throughput system. In 2013 he started his PhD at the Institute of Material Sciences at the Ruhr-University Bochum via a Max Planck Research School SurMat scholarship on high-throughput investigation of photocathodes for renewable hydrogen production. Challenged by the complex and time-consuming analysis of very large data sets very early in his career, he dedicated himself to become a leading expert in machine learning for experimental materials science. In 2015, an exchange semester within the REACH program of the Keller Center at Princeton University followed. After his doctorate, he held a postdoctoral position as a research engineer in the research group of Dr. Gregoire at Caltech from 2017 to 2019. There, he researched machine learning for experimental material sciences until his KIT appointment.
Venue/place of exhibition: Münsterplatz 25, 89073 Ulm
Date: 15/04/2021 to 15/07/2021, extension expected
Opening times: daily from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The city of Ulm celebrates the birthday of Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger. On June 24, 2020, he would have been 250 years old: an inventor from Ulm who was as brilliant as he was willing to take risks. Better known as the “Tailor of Ulm”, he went down in history with his failed flight attempt in 1811. The anniversary celebrations “Berblinger 2020” should not only honor his work, but focus on the topics of innovation, ingenuity, courage and an open city society for change.
Between June 2020 and May 2021, the city of Ulm invites you to celebrate with numerous events and cultural events. Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU) takes part in the celebrations with its own exhibition at “M25 Münsterplatz 25”, a museum wing next to the Ulm Minster.
Battery Exhibition
The exhibition “Electromobility and Energy Storage” covers the full range of Ulm battery research. For the first time, all scientific institutions involved in battery research in Ulm (Helmholtz Institute Ulm, Cluster of Excellence POLiS, research platform CELEST, German Aerospace Center, Ulm University, Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) hosting an event for the public.
Battery All Exhibition – Electromobility and Energy Storage
In addition to a “Blackout” scenario for Ulm in 2028, which simulates a six-day power outage in the Danube-Iller region, top-class exhibits from all participating scientific institutes are presented. For example the hydrogen aircraft Hy4 of the DLR.
What makes this aircraft model special: The real four-seater Hy4 passenger aircraft powered by a fuel cell actually flies over the roofs of Ulm along the Danube during the exhibition period. The flight of the Hy4 machine therefore realizes exactly the dream of the “Tailor of Ulm” Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger in 1811.
Special honor for the young scientist Dr. Montaha Anjass. The 32-year-old is one of eight young scientists from Baden-Württemberg who were awarded the 5,000 euro sponsorship award from the employers’ association Südwestmetall on Wednesday. Anjass received the award for her dissertation at the University of Ulm on the subject of “Experimental and theoretical reactivity studies of molecular metal oxides for energy conversion and storage”.
The doctoral thesis deals with the production of various molecular metal oxides and the investigation of their properties, especially with regard to their suitability as active material in electrochemical storage. The dissertation is based on a remarkable number of six peer-reviewed publications in international specialist journals, which cover a wide range of research from basic electrochemical investigations and stability analyzes to aging behavior in electrochemical laboratory cells or battery cells.
For more than 30 years, Südwestmetall has awarded the sponsorship award to outstanding dissertations by young academics that are particularly important for the industrial world of work and its socio-political framework. The Südwestmetall chairman Dr. Stefan Wolf praised the wide thematic range of this year’s award-winning dissertations. In the direction of the state government, he called for greater support from universities in digitization: “Due to the corona pandemic, the summer semester was offered as a digital semester. The current semester is also expected to be predominantly digital. The experience from this must now be used to make significant progress on the way to a ‘Campus 4.0’. ”
I'm incredibly honored to be awarded the Südwestmetall Förderprise 2020! Many thanks to everyone who helped me along the way!
Thanks a lot! @Suedwestmetall@uni_ulm, @HelmholtzUlm https://t.co/NhmtcqliND— Montaha Anjass (@AnjassMontaha) November 4, 2020
The digitization of university courses and student services, however, is very resource-intensive, noted the employer representative. The state government must therefore provide the universities with even greater financial support, demanded Wolf: “The state has already provided 40 million euros for this. However, this only compensates for the higher education institutions’ need for online courses in the summer semester. For a sustainable digitization of universities, the financial means must be stabilized. Therefore a digital pact with a longer term is necessary here. ”
Text: Thomas Widder (Südwestmetall)
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, no HIU seminars took place in the summer semester of 2020.
In the seminar at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU), outstanding international battery researchers share their scientific findings and technological inventions with Ulm scientists and students. The seminar takes place every Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. during the lecture period.
10.10.2019, 10:00 Uhr
Prof. Dr. Michel Armand
CIC Energigune, Parque Tecnológico de Alava
10.10.2019, 11:00 Uhr
Dr. Dominique Guyomard
Institut des matériaux Jean Rouxel (IMN), Université de Nantes-CNRS
22.10.2019
Dr. Erik Berg
Department of Chemistry – Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University, Sweden
29.10.2019
Dr. Vasily Tarnopolskiy
CEA Grenoble, France
13.11.2019
Prof. Dr. Kristina Tschulik
Ruhr-University Bochum, Bochum
15.11.2019
Juan García Lastra
Technical University of Denmark DTU, Lyngby, Denmark
21.11.2019, 09:30 Uhr
Tu Yue Qi
Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Michigan State University, USA
26.11.2019
Prof. Wolfgang Schuhmann
Analytical Chemistry and Center for Electrochemical Sciences (CES), Ruhr-University Bochum
03.12.2019
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Bessler
Hochschule Offenburg, Offenburg
10.12.2019
Dr. Philip Chater
Diamond Light Source, Didcot, Oxfordshire, UK
2020
07.01.2020
Prof. Dr. Robert Schlögl
Department of Inorganic Chemistry, Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin
14.01.2020
Dr. Denis Kramer
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
15.01.2020
Xiaoping Jiang
MTI Corporation
16.01.2020
Yong Min Lee
Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST)
21.01.2020
Prof. Dr. Michael Danzer
Electrical Energy Systems, University of Bayreuth
23.01.2020
Rahul Parmar
University of Camerino, Italy
28.01.2020
Dr. Cleber F. N. Marchiori
Department of Chemistry, Uppsala University, Sweden
04.02.2020
Prof. Dr. Florian Hausen
Forschungszentrum Jülich
10.02.2020
Prof. Dr. Jay P.C. Sui
Institute of Integrated Energy Systems, University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada
11.02.2020
Yvonne Grunder
University Liverpool
18.02.2020
Prof. Dr. Dina Fattakhova-Rohlfing
Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-1) Forschungszentrum Jülich
25.02.2020
Prof. Dr. Alexej Jerschow
Department of Chemistry, New York University
27.02.2020
Prof. Dr. Edward P.L. Roberts
Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary AB, Canada /// Department of Chemical Engineering, Electrochemical Innovation Laboratory, University College London, London, UK
24.03.2020
Prof. Dr. Hans Peter Schmid
Institute of Meteorology a Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
In the seminar at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU), outstanding international battery researchers share their scientific findings and technological inventions with Ulm scientists and students. The seminar takes place every Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. during the lecture period.
08.04.2019
Prof. Sang-Young Lee
School of Energy and Chemical Engineering UNIST, Korea
23.04.2019
Dr. Chiu Tang
Diamond Light Source, Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
30.04.2019
Prof. Andrea Balducci
Institute for Technical and Environmental Chemistry, Friedrich-Schiller- University Jena
07.05.2019
Phoebe Allan
University of Birmingham
21.05.2019
Dr. Katrin F. Domke
Electrochemical surface science, Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Mainz, Germany
28.05.2019
Prof. Aliaksandr S. Bandarenka
Physics of Energy Conversion and Storage – ECS, Technical University of Munich TUM, Munich, Germany
04.06.2019
Prof. Egbert Figgemeier
Chair for Ageing and Lifetime Prediction of Batteries, RWTH Aachen, FZ Jülich
11.06.2019
Maragonna
Swansea
18.06.2019
Dr. Marie Richard-Lacroix
Nanospectroscopy Group, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena
02.07.2019
Prof. Martin Winter
Helmholtz-Institute Münster HI MS, MEET – Münster
16.07.2019
Prof. Harry Hoster
FRSC, Energy Lancaster, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
29.07.2019
Dr. John Uhlrich
Wiley-VCH Publishing, Weinheim, Germany
30.07.2019
Prof. Ulrike Krewer
Institute of Energy and Process Systems Engineering, Technische Universität Braunschweig
01.08.2019
Matthias Reichert
Entwicklung Hochvolt-Speichersysteme, AUDI AG
In the seminar at the Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU), outstanding international battery researchers share their scientific findings and technological inventions with Ulm scientists and students. The seminar takes place every Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. during the lecture period.
10.10.2018
PD Fabienne Gschwind
Umicore, Group Research & Development, Olen, Belgium
16.10.2018
Prof. Petr Novák
Paul Scherrer Institut PSI, Villigen PSI, Switzerland
23.10.2018
Prof. Volker Presser
Leibniz Institute for New Materials, Saarbrücken, Germany
06.11.2018
Prof. Perla Balbuena
Texas A&M University, College Station, USA
13.11.2018
Prof. Oliver Clemens
Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany
20.11.2018
Dr. Jean-Francois Drillet
DECHEMA-Forschungsinstitut, Frankfurt, Germany
22.11.2018
Prof. William S. Price
Western Sydney University, Australia
27.11.2018
Dr. Marcel Risch
Institute of Materials Physics, University of Göttingen, Germany
04.12.2018
Prof. Nigel Brandon
Imperial College, London, UK
11.12.2018
Prof. Joachim Maier
Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research, MPI Stuttgart, Germany
18.12.2018
Dr. Olaf Böse
Zentrum für Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung Baden-Württemberg ZSW
2019
15.01.2019
Prof. Winter
Helmholtz-Institut Münster (HIMS)
22.01.2019
Prof. Rüdiger-A. Eichel
Forschungzentrum Jülich, Jülich, Germany
29.01.2019
Prof. Barbara Kirchner
Mulliken Center for Theoretical Chemistry, Bonn, Germany
