Physics Colloquium 14th October 2026 - Prof. Louis Piper

Making a battery can be easy; it just consists of mixing, coating, stacking/rolling, filling and forming. Scaling up batteries is hard because it involves optimizing all those steps with the correct tooling & know-how, whilst also hitting perfomance and cost targets in an every moving field. At WMG, we have a battery scale up facility with two operational pilot lines (the most recent being the £12M AMBIC facility in partnership with CPI in the UK). Our activities cover, Kg-scale active material synthesis, formulations (slurry and semi-dry); cell fabrication (pouch and cylindrical); formation, aging & testing; all within a circular economy perspective. We operate on applying our academic understanding to industry formats for accelerating battery innovation and focus on bespoke characterization throughout the process. In this talk, I will provide a summary of our activities and show examples from next generation lithium-ion battery prototypes from our pilot line.