A
multidisciplinary team of researchers at Argonne National Laboratory is working
to develop advanced energy storage technologies to aid the growth of a nascent
U.S. battery manufacturing industry, help transition the U.S. automotive fleet
to one dominated by plug-in hybrid and electric passenger vehicles, and enable
greater use of renewable energy technologies.
“Argonne has had some notable advanced battery technology
development successes,” said Argonne Director Eric Isaacs. “Our scientists
have successfully developed 150 advanced battery technologies in the last
decade. In more recent years, we’ve executed several licensing deals for a
lithium-ion battery technology with General Motors, BASF, Envia, LG Chem, and
Toda America.
We’ll continue to develop and license more advanced battery technologies for
transportation use, but our four decades of battery research experience has
shown us that there is more that we can do, given the increasing demand for
energy worldwide and concerns about energy’s impact on the climate.
“So a
couple of years ago,” Isaacs added, “Argonne decided to expand into
another critical energy research area—large-scale energy storage for electric
utility applications that will enable greater adoption of renewable energy
technologies like wind and solar without compromising the reliability of the
nation’s electricity grid. We are in the beginning stages of that research. At
the same time, Argonne also wanted to ensure
that the advanced technologies being developed here and elsewhere have an easier
time of finding their way into the marketplace and real-life use.”
Under
Argonne’s new Energy Storage Initiative (ESI), the laboratory’s battery program
aims to cover a broad array of advanced energy storage research from basic
materials and cell engineering and design to testing and validation, said Jeff
Chamberlain, who heads the initiative. The initiative reaches across all of the
laboratory’s research directorates and scientific user facilities to deliver
technologies that are built on a solid foundation of basic research.
In
practical terms, for example, that means an Argonne
scientist might first uncover new knowledge about the function of a material as
an electrical charge passes through it. Using this new knowledge a scientist
would perform limited exploratory lab experiments on the new material to
establish reproducible performance. If the performance addresses a market need,
engineering science is conducted to enable production scale-up of the new
material.
“Fortunately,”
Chamberlain said, “at Argonne we have
powerful scientific tools like the Advanced Photon Source (APS), whose x-ray
beams allow us to make the closest possible examination of the new material and
determine how it works, reacts, changes, and recovers under various conditions.
We also capitalize on the powerful tools of our many collaborators, like
Brookhaven and Pacific Northwest national laboratories and the Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.”
Building
on this foundational research, scientists and engineers make commercial-grade
prototype battery cells and map out the various factors involved in making the
battery material work. During the entire R&D process, basic and applied
researchers are able to move back and forth between any of the basic research
and applied research steps in order to fully understand the novel material.
“Bear
in mind that the scientific research we perform is aimed to benefit the
citizens who have invested in the research with their tax dollars,”
Chamberlain said. “Our objective, then, is to aim our research to enable U.S. economic
growth and energy security. To achieve this goal, the U.S. Department of Energy
(DOE) and Argonne consult heavily with and
sometime work directly with industry to ensure the R&D we perform can be
properly capitalized on.”
Moreover,
when a technology’s potential for market adoptability is strong, “it is
part of our job to help industry develop it to the point where it can be
commercialized,” he said. That critical portion of the technology-transfer
equation is now being addressed.
When
industry identifies an innovation that has clear benefit and can be
manufactured, it’s part of our job to perform the engineering research to get
out of the ‘valley of death.’
For
research purposes, scientists need only enough material—10 to 100 grams—to fill
battery cells the size of a button, but manufacturers require tens of kilograms
for pre-commercial validation testing. This is one of the biggest challenges of
many new innovations.
“The
engineering problem associated with scaling up production of a material to a
kilogram is different than understanding how a material functions,”
Chamberlain said, “and the engineering problems must be addressed to
enable validation of a material and understand its true performance.”
With
funding support from DOE and the U.S. Department of Defense, Argonne
is building a Materials Engineering Facility (MEF) to scale-up production of
new materials. Not only does MEF greatly reduce the time needed to produce
larger amounts of novel materials, but the facility’s researchers develop
engineering processes to reduce cost and materials waste. Although construction
of the facility is not yet complete, researchers have, in their interim
facility, successfully developed—in less than six months—a process to make an
innovative Argonne-developed material that provides battery overcharge
protection more economically and with less waste.
Argonne
also partnered with the Commonwealth
of Kentucky in 2009 to establish the
Kentucky-Argonne National Battery Manufacturing Research and Development Center,
which will provide a domestic source of trained engineers, scientists, and
technicians with expertise and skills in battery manufacturing. Construction of
the center’s building will be completed by December, and it will be fully
operational by early 2013.
“Implementation of the Energy Storage Initiative has certainly
positioned the lab to perform the broadest known array of energy storage
research,” Chamberlain said. “And we’re already seeing the benefits from
it.”
