Birmingham battery boost as latest wave of Faraday funding confirmed
Project led by Birmingham University backed as part of £29m funding package from the Faraday Institution to invest in ‘the most promising and impactful’ battery research
Researchers in Birmingham developing novel battery recycling technologies have been awarded funding by the Faraday Institution as part of a £29m package to re-focus and accelerate key battery research projects across the UK.
Four of the six projects to have been awarded funding are from the University of Birmingham, including the Reuse and Recycling of Lithium Ion Batteries (ReLIB) project which is being led by Professor Paul Anderson, co-director of the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials at Birmingham’s School of Chemistry.
The researchers said ReLIB aims to develop and scale novel recycling technologies which will recover valuable materials from end-of-life lithium ion batteries which are used to power electric vehicles (EVs).
Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Leicester, Newcastle and University College London are also working on the ReLIB project, which aims to improve current industry practices to beyond 90 per cent efficiency.
ReLIB researchers said they have already seen “considerable success” and have filed several patents since the project started.
Over the next five years, ReLIB said it aims to develop, improve, and scale technologies and seek long-term commercial partners to participate in pilot studies which will look to incorporate these technologies into existing recycling processes.
They will also continue to explore processes to recover valuable and non-valuable materials from waste streams via novel electrode extraction, delamination, binder recovery, leaching, electrolyte recovery and regeneration, and biological recovery techniques which the researchers said in many cases would be enable e-waste recycling processes at larger scales than previously achieved.
“Despite a proliferation of companies collecting and processing lithium ion batteries for recycling it remains uneconomic to recover most of the components, and materials recovery rates remain low,” said Professor Anderson.
“With the support of this additional funding the ReLiB project will be able to focus efforts on providing effective recycling routes for hard to recycle components and valorising low value recovered material streams.”
Professor Pam Thomas hailed the impact of the latest funding awards. “The Faraday Institution is committed to identifying and investing in the most promising and impactful battery research initiatives,” she said. “This project refocusing is an important part of that process, and allows us to direct even more effort towards those areas of research that offer the maximum potential of delivering commercial, societal and environment impact.”
Three further projects from the Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Minerals were also awarded funding by the Faraday Institution.
A project exploring extending battery life, by understanding degradation mechanisms in lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide NMC811-graphite batteries, is expanding to investigate other systems of industrial interest, the researchers announced.
They explained the project would also include new pouch cell fabrication activity at Warwick Manufacturing Group, which will allow researchers from across the project to access reproducible and reliable cells to perform degradation studies at more industrial-relevant scales.
A second project on battery modelling which explores parameterisation methods and techniques for next-generation models and modelling of batteries beyond lithium-ion was also awarded funding. Researchers said they would focus on methods to determine accurate input parameters for models that define ageing and that accurately represent what happens at battery interfaces.
The third project to be awarded funding is the Lithium-sulfur Batteries (LiSTAR) project. Researchers said it will continue to seek to improve the performance of individual cell components, but with a narrowed focus on maximising the energy density and lifetime of cells using the best preforming materials identified in the project’s first phase.
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