MARVEL groups join BIG-MAP consortium to accelerate battery research

Patrick Mayor, EPFL, NCCR MARVEL

Batteries will play a crucial role in the phase-out of fossil fuels, in particular in the transport sector, but in order to drastically reduce CO₂ emissions in accordance with the regulations implemented in several countries, we need cheaper and more sustainable alternatives to the existing batteries.

That is a big challenge, because the development of new batteries takes a long time - longer than we can wait for the green transition. A new EU project, BIG-MAP (Battery Interface Genome - Materials Acceleration Platform), aims at accelerating the speed of battery development by changing the way we invent batteries, so that future sustainable and ultra-high-performance batteries can be developed 10 times faster than today.

Two MARVEL members will be part of this project. Nicola Marzari’s group will lead the infrastructure and interoperability work package, with the goal of developing infrastructure and the capabilities (software infrastructure, simulation control, experimental control, and data interoperability) leading to automated simulations and experiments, to access these capabilities and data, and to have simulations and experiments communicate to each other. 

Anatole von Lilienfeld’s group will be involved in the accelerated atomic-scale simulations work package, with the development of machine learning models which can serve the ranking and selection of new promising candidate systems.

For more information on the project:

 https://www.dtu.dk/english/news/Nyhed?id=%7B07B60F1D-B78D-4E94-8E9A-29FFFEC421C7%7D