Advanced Materials Battery Industrialisation Centre

Scaling your battery innovations from powder to cell

How this centre can help transform battery materials technology

As industries take steps to meet net-zero targets and transition towards electrification, advanced battery materials are crucial to delivering the next generation of energy storage technologies. This will help drive demand for improved electric vehicles (EVs) and efficient energy storage on the power grid.

The Advanced Materials Battery Industrialisation Centre (AMBIC), funded by UKRI’s Faraday Battery Challenge and delivered by Innovate UK, is a dedicated environment to design, develop, test and commercialise new battery materials and technologies. Its unique setup provides critical capabilities to bridge the gap between battery materials research and cell prototyping. This includes lithium-ion, solid-state batteries (SSBs) and other alternative battery technologies.

Based at CPI in NETPark, County Durham and at WMG, University of Warwick in Coventry, the Centre provides access to state-of-the-art facilities and technical expertise. It accelerates the journey from concept to commercialisation and will help ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of the global battery industry, driving sustainable solutions for a cleaner, more efficient future.

What are the challenges?

One of the biggest barriers to innovation is that batteries are complex to build. The materials process and cell optimisation are intimately linked and often must be developed in tandem to achieve maximum performance from both. In addition, while researchers can produce novel materials in gram-scale quantities, scaling up to kilograms for commercial validation demands specialised equipment and expertise in process chemistry and engineering. This requires significant investment, often out of reach for smaller companies.

SMEs also face difficulties obtaining battery materials by the kilogram with consistent quality control and purchasing tonnes of materials in bulk is economically unviable. This makes it nearly impossible for them to compete with established industry players. Further upstream in the supply chain, companies producing raw materials or recovering them from discarded batteries must demonstrate the performance and validity of their products before supplying them to customers. This adds another hurdle in the commercialisation process.

These barriers make it harder to get new battery innovations across the “valley of death” — the critical stage where promising technologies struggle to transition from the laboratory to industrial-scale production.

How will this centre tackle these challenges?

Led by CPI, in partnership with WMG which are both part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult, AMBIC provides open-access facilities for rapid development and scaling of battery innovations from powder-to-cell and validation for commercial viability.

Equipped with state-of-the-art technology, this Centre enables the production of multi-kilogram batches of innovative battery materials through processing techniques such as:

- Co-precipitation

- Dry and wet milling

- Powder drying and blending

- Calcination under controlled atmospheres.

Customers and collaborators can use the facility flexibly, configuring the processes to suit their specific needs. Benefitting from CPI’s inorganic materials toolkit and process chemistry expertise to scale their innovations from grams to kilograms efficiently.

AMBIC offers the unique service of integrating real-time data collection into the material synthesis process. Using techniques such as soft sensors, we can generate deep insights to optimise process scale-up and improve quality control. This can be combined with machine learning and AI-driven approaches to build predictive models and progress innovations rapidly to commercial production scale.

Additionally, automated screening technologies – capable of producing up to 40 variations in a single day – can rapidly test and optimise new active battery material slurries and electrode coatings for new combinations of materials or cell designs at unprecedented speeds.

This is supported by the comprehensive analytical infrastructure available at CPI’s National Formulation Centre, which ensures battery materials meet the highest industry standards before progressing to full-scale deployment.

AMBIC’s capabilities accelerate the development and commercialisation of high-performance, cost-effective and sustainable battery materials to enable the net-zero transition. In doing so, it supports the growth of the UK’s battery ecosystem and ambition to become a global leader in battery technology.

Our leadership team

Keri Goodwin

Chief Technologist, CPI

Keri Goodwin is currently a Chief Technologist at CPI and has 20 years of materials chemistry research experience. She received an MChem and PhD from the University of Edinburgh, specialising in electrochemical characterisation of inorganic complexes for photovoltaic applications, before beginning her career at CPI in 2009. During this time she worked in the printable electronics division of CPI for 8 years and led the electronic materials development team, publishing several papers and patents relating to this work. This was primarily focused on organic semiconducting materials and formulation development for flexible display applications. Much of this work involved working closely with global corporations designing and optimising polymers and small molecule semiconductors. She is now the strategic lead for the battery materials and formulation development area as part of the National Formulation Centre, within CPI.

Dr. Jagdeep Sagu

Senior Battery Scientist, CPI

Jagdeep’s general background is in materials science and electrochemistry. He started his career in energy materials during his PhD, which focused on utilising waste gases from the steel industry to produce high-surface-area carbon-based materials for application in supercapacitors (sponsored by Tata Steel). He then transitioned into the battery sector, working as Senior Product Development Scientist at Johnson Matthey, where his focus for three years was on the synthesis and optimisation of Ni-rich cathode active materials. Following this, Jagdeep joined a cell manufacturing company (BritishVolt) where he was involved in screening, benchmarking and down-selecting anode and cathode active materials for cell development projects. Jagdeep joined CPI in 2023, where his recent work is focused on coin/pouch cell construction and electrochemical testing. He is currently involved in two Horizon EU battery projects: (1) HealingBat, working on the development of self-healing concepts for lithium-sulfur cells, and (2) Full-Map, as a workpackage lead in the area of high-throughput screening.

Robert Mitchell

Principal Scientist – Energy Materials

Rob is responsible for leading translational research programmes with commercial focus and manages a portfolio of customer engagements delivering existing and next generation battery chemistries. This also includes projects in battery recycling and critical minerals recovery. He has secured significant funding >£3.5 million to support research initiatives. He is currently a Principal Scientist at CPI, with 15 years professional experience, and develops people and capabilities to support technology scale-up.

Dave Parmley

Principal Engineer Complex Particles

Dave has over 36 years R&D experience, primarily working in the Fabric and Home Care sector of Procter & Gamble on particle and process development, and more recently at CPI leading projects across FMCG, Pharma and Aggrotech. Dave has led multi million-pound projects from lab scale innovation and prototyping through to new product start-ups and troubleshooting at manufacturing scale. Dave has expertise in powder processing and handling, spray drying, coating, granulation/agglomeration and material characterisation.

Our track record of collaborative research and development

CPI has supported multiple customers in their battery materials validation and scale-up challenges. They include:

- CatContiCryst: developed innovative new processes for manufacturing key components of their NMC (nickel-manganese-cobalt-based) precursor for Li-ion batteries using a continuous production approach.

- HISTORY: contributed expertise in printable electronics to develop high-silicon content anode formulations incorporating next-generation active materials. It also demonstrated a route to scale up the formulation and coating process.

- Constellation: used AI to design improvements in novel current collectors. This was coupled with an automated coating process for customised electrodes to develop a “drop-in” solution for existing gigafactories that will enable commercialisation in the electric vehicle (EV) market.

- ReTail: accelerate the development and commercialisation of state-of-the-art battery technologies in the UK and support growth of the supply chain in the UK battery sector

- BatCat: creating a digital twin for battery manufacturing that integrates data-driven and physics-based methods

- FULL-MAP: developing a materials acceleration platform that amplifies human capabilities and expedites the discovery of new materials and interfaces

- HealingBat: developing advanced sensing, monitoring and self-healing mechanisms to self-repair batteries

These showcase how AMBIC’s capabilities can support innovative companies, supply chain partners and universities through partnerships on a wide range of projects, responding to the needs of the UK battery development community.

Facing challenges with formulation, scale-up, or commercialisation of battery materials?

Let’s discuss potential solutions and how we can offer support.

For more information

Keri Goodwin

Chief Technologist

Talk to Keri