European Battery HUB (EuBat)

Batteries are very complex systems, where the key performance indicators – energy and power density, lifetime, safety – are controlled by intricate multi-scale mechanisms that are still not understood in detail. Thus, the identification and understanding of reaction and degradation mechanisms is key to accelerate the discovery of new materials and concepts, enabling the breakthroughs awaited by society towards safer and more sustainable next-generation batteries.

The grand challenge lies in the ability to “open the black box”, i.e., the ability to look inside the cells in real time and at real conditions, quantify the phenomena and how they are interconnected, and with this holistic knowledge: discover limiting factors, unravel their inter-dependencies, predict battery performance and lifetime, mitigate degradation. This quest requires going beyond standard characterisation techniques and methods, hence to develop (1) techniques pushing the limits of space and time resolution, (2) new techniques to look at buried interfaces and real cells, (3) bring new, optimised and standard techniques together into correlative scale-bridging characterisation workflows. In this context, synchrotron techniques are crucial because they give access to multidimensional space of parameters from atomic scale to device scale, with ultimate time and space resolutions, and potentially accessible during cycling of full batteries. However, correlative characterisation with synchrotron techniques is challenging due to limited access to several beamlines, limited availability of interoperable operando cells, and large complex datasets already requiring huge efforts.

From 2021 to 2024, the Pilot Battery Hub, coordinated by the French organisation CEA, pioneered collaborative interdisciplinary efforts to enable multi-beamline methodologies based on sample, beamtime & data sharing. Publications resulting from these efforts can be found on the Pilot Battery Hub Publications page. Now, the European Battery Hub deploys and extends the tools at a European scale, delivering new techniques and set-ups to the battery community, standards & protocols to prepare and evaluate samples, to acquire and analyse different types of data from 6 complementary beamlines, making the tools accessible to a larger community of synchrotron users and battery researchers.

The Hub coordinates experiments on 6 core beamlines selected for their complementarity and ability to accommodate operando conditions: BM32, ID13, ID31, ID16B, ID26, ID20. Interoperable tools and cells will be developed (set-ups, sample environments), together with common data handling, protocols and pipelines, to allow for the synchronised acquisition of structural, morphological and chemical information at the scale of particles, components and cells.

Structure of materials, from particle to device (Diffraction/scattering)

• BM32 provides unique capabilities for sub-micron scale distribution of strain/stress over multiple particles thanks to the MicroLaue technique and complementary XRR analysis to probe degradation layers formed with Angström resolution during cycling.
• ID13 allows fast and highly spatially-resolved profiling of low-attenuating material (micro-sized beam at E<23keV), particularly suited to fast scan capillary batteries loaded with advanced materials, which is crucial to monitor heterogeneities in anodes/cathodes/electrolytes of different types.
• ID31 allows to combine multiple techniques in one single experiment (WAXS/SAXS/CT/XRF/GISAXS). It is operable for inhouse-developed cell geometries as well as industrial standard ones (high energy, Scattering Computed Tomography is available in operando mode).

Morphology of complex materials (Tomography)

• ID16B is a versatile station providing a large list of complementary techniques (nano-CT, nano-XRF, XANES, XEOL, XBIC) at the sub-micron scale. The core technique for the Hub is nano-CT for accessing precise materials morphology characterisation at the nano-scale under ex situ/post mortem as well as in situ/operando conditions (in-house developed cell).

Chemical environment and electronic properties (Spectroscopy)

• ID26 allows to access tender X-ray emission spectroscopy (and therefore high resolution XAS) and especially the S K-edge, which is of particular interest for sulfide-based solid electrolytes.
• ID20 provides unique access to low Z elements in the bulk with XRS (e.g., oxygen K edge and transition metal L edges (e.g., Ni)) and additional information on the electronic structure of transition metals by XES.

Additional beamlines such as BM05, BM02 and ID01 provide complementary capabilities that are very interesting to complement the Hub portfolio of beamlines (they are accessed through the conventional single proposal routes).

The consortium is composed of battery experts from France, Germany and Sweden (7 partners including ESRF, 18 PIs and CoPIs) with complementary skills in materials synthesis, component engineering, battery prototyping, electrochemistry, analytical and numerical methods, as well as specialists of various synchrotron methods (μXRD, μLaue, SAXS, SWAXS-CT, XAS, XRS, XES, μXCT, nanoXCT) and/or multimodal approaches applied to complex materials.

Partners & Main PIs

CEA-IRIG, Grenoble, France – Sandrine Lyonnard (coordinator) ; Xaver Brems (project manager) ; Quentin Jacquet

CEA-LITEN, Grenoble, France – Lise Daniel

CNRS-ICGM/RS2E, Montpellier,France – Prof. Lorenzo Stievano

University of Bayreuth, Germany – Prof. Matteo Bianchini

KIT-HIU, Ulm, Germany – Prof. Dominic Bresser

Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden – Prof. Aleksandar Matic

ESRF, Grenoble. Main PI: Jakub Drnec (ID31 beamline scientist); Co-PIs, M. Burghammer (ID13 beamline scientist) and J. Vijayakumar (BM05)

Applications to join the European Battery Hub will be opened after one year of operation, i.e. in September 2025. The procedures to apply will be posted in March 2025. Do not hesitate to write to the coordinator for more information.

For information, please write to the Hub coordinators at the following email address: European Battery Hub.

The obligations of a Hub Partner are given in our Terms of References.

Hub partners also agree to follow the standard ESRF rules related to beamtime and publishing results (safety, sample declaration, GDPR, travel rules, data policy, publication rule...).

Useful links:

ESRF user policies and rules

ESRF publications

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