The Innovation Center for Battery500 Consortium
The Innovation Center for Battery500 Consortium
A collaboration among national labs and academia for more reliable, high-performing vehicle batteries
Battery500 is a collaboration among the national laboratories, academia, and industry to create higher-performing batteries.
(Original photo by Andrea Starr, composite image by Shannon Colson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
About the Innovation Center for Battery500 Consortium
Formed in 2016, the Innovation Center for Battery500 Consortium is made up of a team of battery experts from the national laboratories, academia, and industry who are collaborating to develop high capacity electric vehicle batteries that are more reliable, high performing, safe, and less expensive.
Our Director
Our research
The consortium team is working to increase the energy density of advanced lithium (Li) batteries to beyond what can be achieved in today’s Li-ion batteries. The consortium aims to increase the specific energy (up to 500 Wh kg-1) of today's battery technology, achieve 1,000 charge/discharge cycles, and reduce the cost of cells to significantly less than $100 kWh-1, an important Department of Energy (DOE) goal for carbon-neutral energy and electrification.
Currently, the Battery500 Consortium is focusing on two of the most promising battery chemistries to achieve its 500 Wh kg-1 goal: Li-metal anodes with high-voltage/high-capacity metal oxide cathodes and Li-metal with sulfur cathodes. The consortium is also addressing the fundamental challenges of Li dendrite formation, undesired interfacial reactions, structural degradation, poor ionic and electronic transport, and poor accessibility of active materials, shuttling reaction products as well as manufacturing challenges in high-energy batteries at the cell level.
The Battery500 Consortium team develops an integrated approach to rapidly incorporate the latest materials discoveries and breakthroughs into advanced cell-level designs and fabrication, and to optimize and validate cell properties under realistic conditions.
Our collaborators
The team, led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is a strategic partnership between national labs, universities and industry. The team is made up of leading scientists and engineers whose expertise ranges from fundamental science to system engineering to development and deployment. The consortium’s leadership team, keystone project leads, and principal investigators work closely with the DOE VTO Office, the consortium’s Advisory Board, and the Executive Committee to successfully execute the consortium’s strategy.
The consortium advances its research using capabilities in materials synthesis and scale up, battery fabrication and prototyping, and state-of-the-art characterization and diagnosis. It also leverages the latest developments in electrode and electrolyte materials.
The team collaborates closely with battery and material manufacturers, suppliers, and end-users/original equipment manufacturers in the United States so that the technologies being produced are well aligned with industry needs, poised for transition to commercial production, and helpful in securing the U.S. supply chain.
STEM and diversity opportunities
Supported primarily by DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Office, the Battery500 Consortium provides prime opportunities for students and postdoctoral fellows to obtain broad training from basic science to cell engineering, developing battery expertise and workforce experience that will enable the nation to maintain global leadership. The consortium team works closely with partner institutes to encourage participation from underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and math fields and underserviced communities to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
