New EU project BIG-MAP will accelerate battery development by 5-10 times

The EU's BIG-MAP project hopes to significantly accelerate the development of batteries while paying attention to sustainability. The 34 partners will strengthen data exchange and cooperation and work together within the broader framework of the "Battery 2030+" initiative.

BIG-MAP is the acronym for "Battery Interface Genome - Materials Acceleration Platform". In BIG-MAP, collaboration through data sharing is crucial. The project's stated goal is to "develop a common European data infrastructure and collaborative workflows that can automatically collect, process and use data from all areas of the battery development cycle".

The EU-funded BIG-MAP project aims to significantly reduce the time required to develop new battery types, with a particular focus on sustainability, while also promoting research activities in joint city clusters of excellence.

BIG-MAP is the most extensive single research project in the Battery 2030+ initiative, uniting 34 institutions in 15 countries. In addition to the 13 core partners of Battery 2030+, the BIG-MAP consortium includes 21 leading European partners with complementary battery technologies and fundamental competences in key research areas such as quantum machine learning, deep learning and autonomous synthetic robotics.

The project is led by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), with partners including the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Ulm University and the Helmholtz-Institut Ulm (HIU) from Germany participating in the project through the CELEST research platform (Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage Ulm & Karlsruhe).

Tejs Vegge, project leader at the Technical University of Denmark, puts their goal simply but ambitiously: "We have to reinvent the battery."

“Last year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to the inventors of the lithium-ion battery. It was a fantastic invention, but it took 20 years to go from idea to product – if we want to have sustainable batteries for the energy transition, we need to do it in one-tenth of the time,” he explained.

Specifically, this means that in the next 5-10 years, development time will be accelerated 5-10 times relative to the current R&D speed.

Measures to achieve this goal include artificial intelligence (also used for new materials data) and high-performance computing to analyze big data. BIG-MAP also envisions using robots to "explore complex chemical space" more quickly. Data sharing will also facilitate the work of researchers from different collaborating institutions distributed in different spaces and time zones.

"We will be able to explore complex chemical space with unprecedented speed and quality with the help of autonomously acting robots. Our understanding is supported by the core properties of artificial intelligence," says Professor Helge Stein from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. His research group is responsible for developing the artificial intelligence required for faster discovery of materials and their distribution across the European continent.

Another focus of the project is sustainability, as emphasized by Maximilian Fichtner, scientific spokesperson for CELEST, because Professor Fichtner sees untapped use cases for batteries in renewable energy.

“The vision is not only to be able to develop new batteries faster, but also to ensure that they store energy efficiently and can be produced sustainably and at very low cost. Storing electricity from the sun and wind, for example, in batteries will be much more attractive in the future,” he explained. “The existing discovery, development and manufacturing processes for battery materials and technologies must be recalibrated so that Europe can compete with its main rivals in the United States and Asia.”

BIG-MAP has a budget of €16 million (about RMB 130 million) and will initially run for three years, with an option to extend for another seven years.