It would take thousands of years to explore all possible combinations of future electric battery materials using conventional research methods – but the climate emergency demands fast solutions. Scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the University of Ulm and the Helmholtz Institute Ulm (HIU) have therefore put their heads together to develop a new kind of autonomous battery laboratory that uses artificial intelligence (AI).

The lighthouse facility PLACES/R will form part of the Post Lithium Storage Cluster of Excellence (POLiS) in Ulm. Professor Helge Stein, a spokesperson for POLiS, explains the importance of the launch in a press release: “We are now able to automatically synthesise and assemble batteries and their individual components, initiate a measurement and evaluate it in a fully automated way. Based on the data, the AI-supported facility can even decide which experiment to perform next.”

The high-tech lab will supercharge research and development. "Our facility can test several hundred such variations a day. This is roughly equivalent to the average life's work of a researcher," says Stein. The algorithms can also optimise production processes ten times faster than human efforts alone, meaning new battery concepts can be brought to market rapidly and with a higher success rate.

At the launch of PLACES/R, the Minister for Science, Research and the Arts for the state of Baden-Württemberg, Theresia Bauer, commented, "With the funding of this new platform, a globally unique research infrastructure has been created. We hope for a significant boost in research on energy storage systems, which are essential for the conversion of our energy system and our mobility.”

The data collected will be shared with 34 institutions from 15 countries included in the BIG-MAP project of the European research initiative Battery2030+.