Transportation

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will develop a machine learning-enhanced approach to the design of new battery materials. Currently, such materials are designed in part via numerous expensive high-fidelity computational simulations that predict the performance of a given composition. However, at present, humans must sift through the vast amounts of data generated and manually identify new compositions.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will develop machine learning (ML) enhanced tools to accelerate the development of catalysts that promote the oxygen evolution reaction (OER) or the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR). These reactions are critical to the cost-effective generation (OER) or oxidation (ORR) of hydrogen. Available catalysts for promoting these reactions include scarce and costly precious metals like platinum. Hence, their practical applications are limited by high cost and low abundance in addition to moderate stability.

GE Global Research will develop a probabilistic inverse design machine learning (ML) framework, Pro-ML IDeAS, to take performance and requirements as input and provide engineering designs as output. Pro-ML IDeAS will calculate the design explicitly without iteration and overcome the challenges of ill-posed inverse problems. Pro-ML IDeAS will use GE’s Bayesian hybrid modeling with multi-fidelity intelligent design and analysis of computer experiments and a novel probabilistic invertible neural network (INN). The proposed framework can be applied to general complex design problems.

Sila Nanotechnologies is developing a high-throughput technology for scalable synthesis of high-capacity nanostructured materials for Li-Ion EV batteries. The successful implementation of this technology will allow improvements in energy storage capacity of today’s best batteries at half the cost. In contrast to other high-capacity material synthesis technologies, Sila's materials show minimal volume changes during the battery operation, which is a key challenge of next-generation battery anode materials.

Researchers at Missouri University of Science & Technology (Missouri S&T) are developing an affordable lithium-air (Li-Air) battery that could enable an EV to travel up to 350 miles on a single charge. Today’s EVs run on Li-Ion batteries, which are expensive and suffer from low energy density compared with gasoline. This new Li-Air battery could perform as well as gasoline and store 3 times more energy than current Li-Ion batteries. A Li-Air battery uses an air cathode to breathe oxygen into the battery from the surrounding air, like a human lung.

Xilectric is developing a totally new class of low-cost rechargeable batteries with a chemistry analogous to the original nickel-iron Edison battery. At the turn of the 20th century, Thomas Edison experimented with low-cost, durable nickel-iron aqueous batteries for use in EVs. Given their inability to operate in cold weather and higher cost than lead-acid batteries, Edison’s batteries were eventually dismissed for automotive applications.

PolyPlus Battery Company is developing the world's first commercially available rechargeable lithium-air (Li-Air) battery. Li-Air batteries are better than the Li-Ion batteries used in most EVs today because they breathe in air from the atmosphere for use as an active material in the battery, which greatly decreases its weight. Li-Air batteries also store nearly 700% as much energy as traditional Li-Ion batteries. A lighter battery would improve the range of EVs dramatically.

Applied Materials is developing new tools for manufacturing Li-Ion batteries that could dramatically increase their performance. Traditionally, the positive and negative terminals of Li-Ion batteries are mixed with glue-like materials called binders, pressed onto electrodes, and then physically kept apart by winding a polymer mesh material between them called a separator. With the Applied Materials system, many of these manually intensive processes will be replaced by next generation coating technology to apply each component.

Planar Energy Devices is developing a new production process where lithium-ion batteries would be printed as a thin film onto sheets of metal or plastic. Thin-film printing methods could revolutionize battery manufacturing, allowing for smaller, lighter, and cheaper EV batteries. Typically, a battery’s electrolyte—the material that actually stores energy within the cell—is a liquid or semi-liquid; this makes them unsuitable for use in thin-film printing. Planar is working with a ceramic-based gel electrolyte that is better suited for printing.

Scientists at 24M Technologies are crossing a Li-Ion battery with a fuel cell to develop a semi-solid flow battery. This system relies on some of the same basic chemistry as a standard Li-Ion battery, but in a flow battery the energy storage material is held in external tanks, so storage capacity is not limited by the size of the battery itself. The design makes it easier to add storage capacity by simply increasing the size of the tanks and adding more paste. In addition, 24M's design also is able to extract more energy from the semi-solid paste than conventional Li-Ion batteries.