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Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona), 24th October 2023. In the current landscape of global challenges, the progress in creating and testing innovative materials and technologies, enabling sustainable green energy ecosystems, is crucial for moving toward a green and resilient economy. In particular, the development of reliable, safe and affordable batteries, based on abundant and low-cost elements, is essential for key necessities of our modern society, including advancing electro mobility, energy storage for grid applications, and Internet of Things applications. Additionally, advances in manufacturing high-temperature superconducting tapes hold promise for the energy sector, with applications including power lines, wind energy, and aeronautics, and even in the utilization of fusion energy.
ALBA and ICMAB-CSIC have teamed up to create and commission a laboratory infrastructure, allowing ALBA's user community in the field of energy storage to prepare, test and optimize their samples directly at ALBA's premises. This initiative was funded by the CSIC PTI+ TransEner initiative and ALBA. This is particularly beneficial for Spanish and international research teams that are not based in Barcelona area but also benefits the highly complex development of local groups in the area of superconductive cable developments.
The new laboratory has two specialization parts, both devoted to finding greener energy applications in relevant industrial sectors. One is aimed at producing high-throughput samples of superconducting tapes and the second one is for developing batteries, in order to analyze them under in situ (real-time observation) and operando (in operation) conditions using synchrotron-based characterization techniques.
In this new laboratory, scientists can prepare samples in situ at a rapid pace and under controlled atmospheres, closely resembling industrial conditions. The laboratory is fully equipped and optimized for the preparation and the operando study of batteries. Besides coin-cells, a second kind of increasing economic importance called 'pouch cells', which is already being used in some electric vehicles, can be assembled and electro-chemically tested in this new lab before they are studied with synchrotron light. "Having this laboratory at ALBA is of great help for the battery community. Apart from having the possibility of preparing different type of samples, we can better prepare and optimize the experiments with synchrotron light", says Maria Rosa Palacín, researcher at the Solid State Chemistry (SSC) Group of ICMAB-CSIC.
This new joint CSIC-ALBA laboratory for energy applications is a new model how CSIC and ALBA can work together for contributing to the solutions, which will make our future bright and prosperous.
