Faraday Institution commits a further £9M to battery research to deliver commercial impact

Project commenced to advance battery formation, ageing, and testing for efficient and sustainable manufacturing

2025-09-03

(Press-News.org) HARWELL, UK (3 September 2025) The Faraday Institution has announced a £9 million commitment to build on its application-inspired research programme to deliver the battery innovations of tomorrow.

The two new projects, that will begin in October 2025, include, for the first time, a Faraday Institution project to advance the scientific understanding of battery formation, ageing and testing -- a stage at the end of the battery manufacturing process. The project will aim to formulate new protocols to reduce battery manufacturing time and energy consumption in gigafactories.

This is the first of a number of new initiatives by the Faraday Institution since the Department for Business and Trade announced a multi-year £452 million investment in the Battery Innovation Programme (formerly the Faraday Battery Challenge) in the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan in June 2025.

“The UK’s sustained investment in research at its world-leading universities is unlocking transformative battery discoveries that, when translated into industry, will drive major advances in performance across multiple sectors. The Government’s long-term commitment ensures that breakthroughs move from the lab to commercial application, fuelling economic growth, and creating high-value jobs for the future,” commented Professor Martin Freer, CEO, Faraday Institution.

The Faraday Institution’s long-term funding also means it is in a position to add Transformational Challenges to its research portfolio. These target energy storage application challenges that have extraordinary impact potential where there are currently only conceptional solutions or ideas. The first Challenge (UltraStore) will develop ultra-low cost long duration energy storage solutions for the grid and the co-creation and planning phase is underway. The second will focus on ultra-high energy density batteries, targeting aerospace, defence and other applications – more details will follow later this year.

The Faraday Institution is the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research, skills development, market analysis and early-stage commercialisation. It is a delivery partner for the Battery Innovation Programme, supporting the UK's advancement in batteries—designated as a 'frontier industry' within the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan of the UK's Industrial Strategy.

It leverages the position of the UK as providing world-leading battery research to optimise battery technologies to make them cheaper, better performing, fully sustainable and recyclable, and capture sovereign capabilities in next generation batteries chemistries.

The £9 million announced today will fund two research projects:

Advancing Battery Formation, Ageing, and Testing for Efficient Manufacturing and Sustainability

The FAST project addresses a critical bottleneck in lithium-ion battery manufacturing: the time, energy, and cost-intensive nature of the formation, ageing, and testing (FA&T) processes. While the steps are well established as part of commercial battery manufacturing processes, the scientific detail is poorly understood mechanistically and their development to date has been largely via empirical optimisation. Yet formation is essential for the establishment of interphase layers, the properties of which directly influence battery cycle life, capacity, and safety.

FAST aims to develop a science-based, scalable and more sustainable FA&T framework, optimised initially for high nickel NMC (LiNi0.9Mn0.05Co0.05O2 and above) paired with graphite or graphite–silicon anodes. Using a range of tools and protocols, researchers will track, and optimise, the physical and chemical changes that occur during formation and ageing, providing previously unmeasured mechanistic data to inform and validate new FA&T protocols that reduce manufacturing time and energy consumption, and maximise energy density, cycle life and improve reproducibility.

The project is being led by Professor Emma Kendrick, University of Birmingham, with the Universities of Warwick, Cambridge, Nottingham and Oxford, and four industry partners plus UKBIC.

Accelerated Development of Next Generation Lithium-rich 3D Cathode Materials

The 3D-CAT project is seeking to develop novel, partially ordered Li-rich 3-dimensional cathode materials from first principles, through to synthesis at 100g scale and validation in single layer pouch cells.

Changes to the cathode are a route to significant improvements in future lithium-ion battery performance. The development of new cathode materials that outperform lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) cathodes without requiring costly, geographically concentrated precursors or impractical synthesis routes, and that have performance to rival lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (NMC) hold substantial disruptive potential for the UK. Among the best materials in this class are lithium-rich disordered rocksalts. 3D-CAT builds on recent research that has revealed that partial (local) ordering of lithium and transition metal elements in the crystal lattice of disordered rocksalts can influence the 3D structure of the lithium-ion transport network and improve how fast the battery can be charged or deliver its energy during use – the rate performance.

The project is being led by Dr Robert House, University of Oxford, with University College London and four industry partners plus the AMBIC materials scale up facility at CPI.

The projects are expected to run to September 2028, with confirmation of funding beyond March 2027 to follow in early 2026.

The Faraday Institution research programme also includes eight other main application-inspired, multi-disciplinary, multi-university research projects on battery degradation, modelling, recycling, safety, electrode manufacturing, as well as next-generation chemistries: lithium-sulfur, sodium-ion, and solid-state batteries. The Faraday Institution has convened a research community of 500+ from 25 UK universities and 147 industry partners that are helping to inform research directions and accelerate routes to market. Today’s announcement builds on a previous investment of £183 million since 2018 on the organisation’s portfolio of main projects.

###

Notes to Editors

About the Faraday Institution

The Faraday Institution is the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research, skills development, market analysis, and early-stage commercialisation. Bringing together expertise from universities and industry, the Faraday Institution endeavours to make the UK the go-to place for the research and development of new electrical storage technologies for both the automotive and wider relevant sectors. Headquartered at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, the Faraday Institution is a registered charity with an independent board of trustees, and a delivery partner for the Battery Innovation Programme (formerly the Faraday Battery Challenge).

For more information on the Faraday Institution, visit www.faraday.ac.uk and follow Faraday Institution on LinkedIn.

The Battery Innovation Programme is supported by Innovate UK. The Programme is making the UK a science and innovation superpower for batteries, supporting the UK's world-class battery facilities along with growing innovative businesses that are developing the battery supply chain for our future prosperity. Its aim is to build a high-tech, high-value, high-skill battery industry in the UK. Find out more.

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Study: Evaluating chatbot accuracy in the fast-changing blood cancer field

2025-09-03

MIAMI, FLORIDA (EMBARGOED UNTIL SEPT 3, 2025, AT 6:00 A.M. EDT) – Patients are increasingly turning to AI for medical information and even advice, but how should they approach using AI-powered services? A new study published Sept. 3 in the peer-reviewed journal, Future Science OA, provides insight into this question for the fast-moving field of blood cancer, evaluating the quality of responses by ChatGPT to a set of 10 medical questions. The study investigated ChatGPT 3.5, a version of the popular chatbot from OpenAI that was freely available when the study was conducted, in July 2024. Four anonymous hematology-oncology physicians evaluated the answers. ChatGPT 3.5 performed best ...

A ‘wasteful’ plant process makes a key prenatal vitamin. Climate change may reduce it.

2025-09-03

New research from Michigan State University reveals that photorespiration – long considered a wasteful process – is essential for producing a crucial nutrient for preventing birth defects. For the first time, scientists have measured how much carbon flows through photorespiration to make folates, a class of compounds that includes vitamin B9 – known for its importance as a prenatal vitamin. According to the study, led by MSU researcher Berkley Walker, about 6 percent of the carbon absorbed by plants is used to make folates. That number plummets by fivefold when photorespiration is suppressed. These findings, published in Nature Plants, could help scientists engineer ...

Targeted cell removal offers treatment hope

2025-09-03

A team of scientists at Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) has created a protein-based therapeutic tool that could change the way we treat diseases caused by harmful or unnecessary cells. The new tool, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, involves a synthetic protein called Crunch, short for Connector for Removal of Unwanted Cell Habitat. Crunch uses the body’s natural waste removal system to clear out specific target cells, offering hope for improved treatments for cancer, autoimmune diseases, and other diseases where harmful cells cause damage. Every day, billions of our body’s ...

Here we glow: New organic liquid provides efficient phosphorescence

2025-09-03

Osaka, Japan – The nostalgic “glow-in-the-dark” stars that twinkle on the ceilings of childhood bedrooms operate on a phenomenon called phosphorescence. Here, a material absorbs energy and later releases it in the form of light. However, recent demand for softer, phosphorescent materials has presented researchers with a unique challenge, as producing organic liquids with efficient phosphorescence at room temperature is considered difficult. Now, researchers at The University of Osaka have attempted to tackle this problem by producing an organic liquid that phosphoresces in the ambient environment. ...

Countries’ carbon budget math is broken

2025-09-03

Climate action is falling behind on the goals as stated in the Paris Agreement. To meet those goals, countries must act according to their ‘fair share’ targets. However, researchers from Utrecht University found a bias in how ambition and fairness assessments were calculated until now: “previous studies assessing countries climate ambition share a feature that rewards high emitters at the expense of the most vulnerable ones.” This finding influences climate change mitigations globally. The research, led by Yann Robiou du Pont, was published on 3 September in Nature Communications. The ...

Global methane levels continue rising as planet heats up

2025-09-03

The world’s methane emissions continue to rise steadily with no signs of slowing, as global trade contributes some 30% to the total amount of the greenhouse gas swirling around the planet, a new study reveals. As major trade patterns shift, South-South transactions now dominate global supply chains with developing countries increasingly participating in global supply chains. Asia and the developing Pacific region emerge as the largest contributors to global methane emissions, driven by rapid industrialisation and population growth. Publishing their research today (3 Sep) in Nature Communications, an international team led by researchers at the Universities of Birmingham ...

Do state bans on flavored e-cigarettes inadvertently increase traditional cigarette use?

2025-09-03

A study in Health Economics reveals that comprehensive state bans on flavored e-cigarettes may reduce vaping among young adults, but they can also lead to increased use of traditional cigarettes. Using information from national datasets and advanced statistical methods, researchers found evidence that young adults 18–24 years of age decrease their use of e-cigarettes by about 2–3 percentage points after state bans, while increasing traditional cigarette use by a similar amount. Because cigarettes are more dangerous to health than e-cigarettes, there appears to be a net negative effect on health for this age group. For youth ...

Do sports teams provide less injury protection for players with temporary contracts?

2025-09-03

Research in Economic Inquiry reveals that Major League Baseball teams appear to manage player injuries differently depending on contract status, with players on temporary contracts missing significantly fewer games due to injury. This suggests that teams may invest less in the long-term health of non-permanent players. For the study, investigators analyzed 2009–2017 data, with 4,125 observations for 1,184 unique players, so that the average player had available data for approximately 3.5 years. The findings raise ...

Could a new method offer a sustainable solution for lithium recovery?

2025-09-03

Society is experiencing increased global demand for lithium, a critical resource for rechargeable batteries in electric vehicles, consumer electronics, and energy storage systems. Conventional lithium extraction methods from ore reserves or liquid lithium resources are saddled with low efficiency, high costs, and environmental concerns, but researchers have now developed a promising new method. As described in Advanced Functional Materials, the method involves a solar-powered evaporator that extracts lithium from saline, or salt, lakes. The method relies ...

Researchers explore new strategies to develop environmentally safe polymer materials

2025-09-03

Traditional polymers such as plastics are widely utilized for their chemical inertness and durability. However, these very properties make them non-degradable in nature and cause long-term environmental damage due to their persistence. In this light, biodegradable polymers that can be broken down by microbes have gained a lot of attention and scientists have turned towards cyclic ketene acetals (CKAs), a group of organic compounds containing carbon atoms and oxygen arranged in a ring-like structure, to develop biodegradable polymers. CKAs ...

Faraday Institution commits a further £9M to battery research to deliver commercial impact

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES: