The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory is joining DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) in a new national consortium aimed at accelerating the transition of energy storage innovations from discovery to domestic manufacturing.
Called the Battery Manufacturing (BattMan) Accelerator, the consortium will tackle key challenges in scaling emerging battery technologies, with a focus on lowering manufacturing costs, shortening development timelines and strengthening U.S. leadership in advanced energy storage.
"Breakthroughs in battery science must be matched by our ability to manufacture them at scale. BattMan brings together the tools, data and partnerships needed to design manufacturable solutions from the start and accelerate their transition into industry," said Jie Xiao, Battelle Fellow at PNNL with a joint appointment as Boeing Martin professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.
The four laboratories contribute complementary strengths to bridge gaps between lab discovery and commercial production. PNNL will apply manufacturing science to show that new materials and processes can scale. Argonne will expand this work by validating feasibility and increasing production using its pilot lines. Both labs will provide materials - such as powders and electrodes - to ORNL for smart coating process development. NLR will lead the integration of advanced characterization, physics-guided quality control and digital materials design for rapid feedback to project partners.
"Argonne brings materials synthesis and process scale-up capabilities that can shorten the time required for new technologies to reach commercialization," said Jianlin Li, director of the Energy Storage and Conversion department at Argonne, who serves as the lab's lead on the project. "Demonstrating technical and economic feasibility at larger production volumes is essential for validating new technologies efficiently."
BattMan will also strengthen critical mineral supply chains by advancing battery materials made from more abundant domestic elements.
In addition to Argonne, PNNL, ORNL and NLR, the BattMan Accelerator includes the University of Washington, Binghamton University, University of Alabama, Arizona State University and University of Michigan-Dearborn as founding partners. The accelerator is actively establishing collaborations with companies across the battery and materials manufacturing sector. The laboratories will work closely with these university partners and industry to test and validate manufacturing processes at increasing scales and toward commercially viable production.
"To advance the next generation of battery technologies, we must reduce the risks associated with scaling innovations from laboratory discovery to commercial production," said Claus Daniel, associate laboratory director for Argonne's Advanced Energy Technologies directorate. "Processes that work at small scale can behave very differently at larger volumes. Addressing those uncertainties earlier with better science, reliable data and rigorous validation gives companies greater confidence to invest."
SI-Driven Manufacturing
Super intelligence (SI) is expected to play a central role in the initiative.
"SI-driven methods that use processing and manufacturing data have the potential to speed up discovery of new materials, improve efficiency of laboratory processes and support predictive, cost-effective design," Xiao said.
"Beyond enabling high throughput, SI has the potential to optimize workflows to reduce cost and accelerate technology maturation," Li said. "The Argonne team will begin by applying SI to individual processes and later integrate SI models across full production line."
As part of BattMan, Argonne will generate synthesis and scale-up data, train machine learning models and identify optimal processing conditions through active learning.
Scientific Goals
In the near term, BattMan will deploy high-throughput experimentation, automated synthesis and characterization, and digital manufacturing tools to improve data quality, reproducibility and process consistency across partner institutions.
Longer term, the consortium aims to develop self-optimizing manufacturing systems using real-time data, digital twins and tight closed-loop control. BattMan will build on the autonomous laboratory concepts by advancing autonomous pilot lines designed to reduce scale-up time and costs, accelerate commercialization and reinforce domestic supply chains.
BattMan is currently forming industry partnerships in battery and battery-materials manufacturing.