Advanced Clean Energy program: Battery energy storage

Featured

• Have a safe trip - NRC looks at better ways to transport lithium batteries
• Mining the green economy: Working with lithium and graphite miners to strengthen Canada's ES opportunity
• Defining Canada's role in a growing vanadium market
• Creating a second life for EV/PHEV batteries

Expertise

We offer clients access to world-class competencies and unique and specialized facilities conveniently located at NRC sites across the country.

Battery metals production and processing technologies

• Canadian-specific materials such as lithium, lithium brine, nickel and cobalt salts
• co-production/processing of vanadium electrolytes with minimal impurities
• natural flake graphite for use in battery anodes and cathodes

Battery materials and components

• development of new membranes/separators, investigation of cathode-electrolyte interfaces, and battery management systems
• evaluation and improvement of battery properties such as capacity retention, cyclic stability, specific capacity and current density, and rate performance
• wet lithium cells, flow batteries, next-generation solid-state battery technologies

Battery recycling, state of health and state of charge

• improving the ability to understand the state of health of consumer and electric vehicle batteries, to determine if the cell should be reused in alternate applications such as stationary storage or backup, remanufactured into a new pack or module, or sent for large-scale recycling
• assisting in the development of standards related to the shipment of end-of-life cells, and improvement and optimization of battery recycling processes themselves

Battery safety and performance testing

• modelling and experimentation to identify high-risk failure scenarios for testing the safety of lithium-ion cells
• thermal abuse testing
• early detection for lithium-ion batteries' thermal runaway based on gas sensing
• experimental studies on suppression of fire and explosion of lithium iron phosphate batteries by inert gas amongst others 

Research facilities

Collaborators have access to a wide range of facilities that can be used to perform component-level validation, manufacturability assessment and improvements, materials evaluation and development, and accelerated testing. The following facilities are available in the NRC's national labs in Vancouver, Ottawa, Boucherville and Edmonton:

• Microgrid
• Battery performance and safety evaluation research facility
• Pilot-scale battery manufacturing line facility
• Energy storage component cyclers
• Thermal chambers
• Fire and containment facilities
• Dry room
• Electrode fabrication facilities
• Materials synthesis labs
• A wide range of characterization equipment (e.g. XRD, TEM, SEM, XPS, TGA, XRF, NMR)
• Energy storage systems lab and testing facilities
• Cluster computing resources