Making perfect SeNSE

No new cars with combustion engines are to be sold in Europe after 2035. To achieve this ambitious goal, one thing is needed above all: better batteries so that electric cars can charge faster, travel longer distances and have a smaller ecological footprint. A large number of major research projects are supporting the battery and automotive industry in developing the batteries of the future. One of these, a Horizon 2020 project called SeNSE, came to a successful conclusion in early 2024.

The four-year EU project with an overall budget of more than 10 million Euro was initiated and led by researchers from Empa's Materials for Energy Conversion laboratory. At the time of the call for proposals, the relatively new laboratory was barely known in the field of battery research. Laboratory head Corsin Battaglia knew that in order to be part of a European battery project, he and his team would have to launch one themselves. And this they did: Battaglia and his colleague Ruben-Simon Kühnel were able to persuade institutions and industrial companies from around the world to join them, and together, they secured the funding.

The aim of SeNSE was both pragmatic and ambitious. The eleven collaborators wanted to develop solutions for the next generation of lithium-ion batteries – the next, emphasizes Battaglia, and not the one after that. In other words: At the end of the project, the developed materials and technologies should be as close as possible to industrial-scale production, and therefore to being used in electric cars. "We are also researching battery technologies that are potentially worlds better than lithium-ion batteries – more sustainable, safer and with a higher energy density," says Battaglia. "But it will still be a few years before they can be produced industrially. In SeNSE, we wanted to develop technologies that can be installed in market-ready electric cars within a few years."

To achieve this, the teams involved worked through almost the entire battery production value chain in just four years: from developing new materials and scaling them up to installing them in battery cells. The pouch cells, which are roughly the size of a smartphone, were manufactured by the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT). FPT Motorenforschung AG, the Innovation center of FPT Industrial brand, belonging to Iveco Group, was then able to install the cells in a ready-to-use module like the ones used in electric vehicles – including the associated electronics and software.

The path to success was not without its hurdles, though. In addition to the major organizational challenges posed by the pandemic, unstable supply chains and rising raw material and energy prices, there were also technical difficulties. For example, the prototype cells are not yet as stable as the project team would like them to be. Scaling, although successful, is also far from complete. “We have scaled up all new developments from laboratory to pilot scale,” says Battaglia. “For production in a so-called gigafactory, of, e.g., project partner Northvolt, producing multiple gigawatt hours of batteries per year, the entire material production process would have to be scaled up once more, say, by a factor of 1000.” This will require the commitment of industry.

Meanwhile, the Empa researchers are already turning their attention to the next European battery project. SeNSE had three sister projects that were funded in the same call for proposals. “We have founded a joint cluster for battery research, and we regularly exchange ideas and results,” says Kühnel. The coordinators of the four projects have now launched a joint Horizon Europe research project called IntelLiGent. The aim is to develop cobalt-free high-voltage cells for electric cars.

The Horizon 2020 project SeNSE aimed to develop the next generation of lithium-ion batteries and strengthen the European battery industry. The four-year project was led by Empa and supported by the EU with 10 million Euros. The academic collaborators involved were the University of Münster, the Helmholtz Institute Münster, Coventry University in the UK, the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW), as well as several industrial partners: the Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt, the Swiss Innovation center of FPT Industrial, namely FPT Motorenforschung AG, the French start-ups Solvionic and Enwires and the chemical company Huntsman, which operates a research site in Basel.