The Faraday Institution has announced a £9m (US$12.2m) commitment to build on its application-inspired research program to develop battery innovations with the introduction of two additional projects.
The two new projects will begin in October 2025. One of them aims to advance the scientific understanding of battery formation, aging and testing — a stage at the end of the battery manufacturing process. The project aims to formulate protocols to reduce battery manufacturing time and energy consumption in gigafactories.
This is the first of several new Faraday Institution initiatives since the Department for Business and Trade announced a multi-year £452m (US$614m) investment in the Battery Innovation Programme (formerly the Faraday Battery Challenge) in its Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan in June 2025.
The projects are expected to run to September 2028, with confirmation of funding beyond March 2027 to follow in early 2026.
“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,” said industry minister Sarah Jones. “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.”
Prof. Martin Freer, the CEO of the Faraday Institution, added, “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, fueling economic growth and creating high-value jobs for the future.”
The Faraday Institution’s long-term funding adds transformational challenges to its research portfolio. These target energy storage application challenges have extraordinary impact potential, where there are currently only conceptual solutions or ideas. The first challenge (UltraStore) will develop ultra-low-cost, long-duration energy storage solutions for the grid; the co-creation and planning phase is underway. The second will focus on ultra-high energy density batteries, targeting aerospace, defense and other applications – more details will follow later this year.
FAST project
The formation and aging for sustainable battery technologies (FAST) project addresses a critical bottleneck in lithium-ion battery manufacturing: the time, energy and cost-intensive nature of the formation, aging and testing (FA&T) processes. Although the steps are well established as part of commercial battery manufacturing processes, the scientific detail is poorly understood mechanistically and their development to date has been largely via empirical optimization. Yet formation is essential for the establishment of interphase layers, the properties of which directly influence battery cycle life, capacity and safety.
FAST aims to develop a science-based, scalable and more sustainable FA&T framework, optimized initially for high-nickel NMC paired with graphite or graphite-silicon anodes. Using a range of tools and protocols, researchers will track and optimize the physical and chemical changes that occur during formation and aging, providing previously unmeasured mechanistic data to inform and validate FA&T protocols that reduce manufacturing time and energy consumption, and to maximize energy density and cycle life and improve reproducibility.
3D-CAT project
The 3D-CAT project seeks to develop novel, partially ordered lithium-rich three-dimensional cathode materials from first principles through to synthesis at 100g scale and validation in single-layer pouch cells.
Changes to the cathode are a route to significant improvements in future lithium-ion battery performance. New cathode materials that outperform lithium iron phosphate (LFP) and lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) cathodes without requiring costly, geographically concentrated precursors or impractical synthesis routes, and that have performance to rival lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (NMC), hold substantial disruptive potential for the UK. Among the best materials in this class are lithium-rich disordered rock salts. 3D-CAT builds on recent research that has revealed that partial (local) ordering of lithium and transition metal elements in the crystal lattice of disordered rock salts can influence the 3D structure of the lithium-ion transport network and improve how fast the battery can be charged or deliver its energy during use – the rate performance.
In related news, Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) and Mazda Motor Corporation (Mazda) recently began field tests of Toyota’s Sweep Energy Storage System at Mazda’s Hiroshima Plant in Japan