Why
is there a European Battery Hub?
Batteries are very complex systems, where the key performance indicators – energy and power density, lifetime, safety – are controlled by intricate multi-scale mechanisms that are still not understood in detail. Thus, the identification and understanding of reaction and degradation mechanisms is key to accelerate the discovery of new materials and concepts, enabling the breakthroughs awaited by society towards safer and more sustainable next-generation batteries.
Adv. Energy Mater. 2022, 12, 2102694
The grand challenge lies in the ability to “open the black box”, i.e., the ability to look inside the cells in real time and at real conditions, quantify the phenomena and how they are interconnected, and with this holistic knowledge: discover limiting factors, unravel their inter-dependencies, predict battery performance and lifetime, mitigate degradation. This quest requires going beyond standard characterisation techniques and methods, hence to develop (1) techniques pushing the limits of space and time resolution, (2) new techniques to look at buried interfaces and real cells, (3) bring new, optimised and standard techniques together into correlative scale-bridging characterisation workflows. In this context, synchrotron techniques are crucial because they give access to multidimensional space of parameters from atomic scale to device scale, with ultimate time and space resolutions, and potentially accessible during cycling of full batteries. However, correlative characterisation with synchrotron techniques is challenging due to limited access to several beamlines, limited availability of interoperable operando cells, and large complex datasets already requiring huge efforts.
From 2021 to 2024, the Pilot Battery Hub, coordinated by the French organisation CEA, pioneered collaborative interdisciplinary efforts to enable multi-beamline methodologies based on sample, beamtime & data sharing. Now, the European Battery Hub deploys and extends the tools at a European scale, delivering new techniques and set-ups to the battery community, standards & protocols to prepare and evaluate samples, to acquire and analyse different types of data from 6 complementary beamlines, making the tools accessible to a larger community of synchrotron users and battery researchers.