The project will advance battery formation, ageing, and testing for efficient and sustainable manufacturing
The Faraday Institution is committing £9 million to advance its application-inspired research programme to deliver battery innovations
Two new projects will begin in October 2025, including a Faraday Institution project that will advance scientific understanding of battery formation, ageing and testing. The project aims to develop new protocols to reduce the time and energy it takes to manufacture batteries in gigafactories.
This marks the beginning of several new initiatives by the Faraday Institution, following the Department for Business and Trade's announcement of a £452 million, multi-year investment in the Battery Innovation Programme, formerly known as the Faraday Battery Challenge, as part of the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan in June 2025.
Industry minister Sarah Jones said, “Through our modern Industrial Strategy, we’re going further than ever before to back industry, with the biggest package of investments ever launched by a British government to turbocharge growth."
“With this funding, we’re ensuring we stay at the cutting edge of innovation by backing scale-ups, research and fast-tracking new technologies to market, helping unlock new growth and investment as part of our Plan for Change.”
Professor Martin Freer, CEO, Faraday Institution, said, “The UK’s sustained investment in research at its world-leading universities is unlocking transformative battery discoveries that, when translated into industry, will drive major advances in performance across multiple sectors. The Government’s long-term commitment ensures that breakthroughs move from the lab to commercial application, fuelling economic growth, and creating high-value jobs for the future.”
The Faraday Institution's long-term funding also puts it in a position to add Transformational Challenges to its research portfolio. These highlight challenges in energy storage applications that have impact potential where there are currently only conceptional solutions or ideas.
The Faraday Institution is a delivery partner for the Battery Innovation Programme to support the UK's advancements in batteries, named a 'frontier industry' within the Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan of the UK's Industrial Strategy.
It uses the UK's position in battery research to optimise battery technologies, reducing costs and improving performance, making them sustainable and recyclable, while also capturing sovereign capabilities in next-generation battery chemistry.
The £9 million will fund two research projects:
Advancing battery formation, ageing and testing
The FAST project addresses a bottleneck in lithium-ion battery manufacturing: the time, energy, and costs needed for the formation, ageing, and testing (FA&T) processes. The steps are established as part of commercial battery manufacturing processes; however, the scientific details aren't as well understood mechanistically, and so their development has been mainly due to empirical optimisation.
Formation is crucial for the establishment of interphase layers, the properties of which influence battery lifecycle, capacity, and safety directly.
FAST aims to develop a science-based, scalable and sustainable FA&T framework which is optimised for high nickel NMC paired with graphite or graphite-silicon anodes.
Utilising various tools and protocols, researchers will track and optimise the physical and chemical changes that occur during formation and ageing, generating previously unmeasured mechanistic data. This will inform and validate new FA&T protocols that reduce manufacturing time and energy consumption, increase energy density, and improve reproducibility.
The project is led by Professor Emma Kendrick, University of Birmingham, with the Universities of Warwick, Cambridge, Nottingham and Oxford, and four industry partners, including UKBIC.
Developing next-generation lithium-rich 3D cathode materials
The 3D-CAT project is developing novel, partially ordered Li-rich 3D cathode materials from first principles, through to synthesis at 100g scale and validation in single-layer pouch cells.
Any changes made to the cathode will result in future improvements to lithium-ion battery performance. Developing new cathode materials that can outperform lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and lithium maganese iron phosphate (LMFP) cathodes without the need for expensive, geographically concentrated precursors or impractical synthesis routes, that can rival the performance of lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (NMC), will have huge disruptive potential for the UK.
The best materials for this are lithium-rich disordered rocksalts. 3D-CAT advances on previous research that revealed partial (local) ordering of lithium and transition metal elements in the crystal lattice of disordered rocksalts can influence the 3D structure of the lithium-ion transport network and improve the speed at which a battery can be charged or deliver its energy during use, the rate performance.
The project is led by Dr Robert House, University of Oxford, with University College London and four industry partners, plus the AMBIC materials scale-up facility at CPI.
