NLR Joins New DOE Consortium To Advance Battery Manufacturing and Strengthen US Competitiveness

Battery Manufacturing Accelerator Will Integrate Super Intelligence and Automation With Manufacturing To Bring Energy Storage Innovations From Lab to Market

Golden, CO, Oct. 28, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) is joining the Battery Manufacturing Accelerator (BattMan) consortium, a national collaboration to address critical manufacturing barriers impeding the scale-up and market deployment of new battery technologies.

The BattMan consortium will focus on lowering manufacturing costs, shortening development timelines, and establishing U.S. manufacturing leadership in advanced energy storage solutions for the electric grid, digital infrastructure, electric mobility, and national security. BattMan will also support critical mineral supply chains by helping make new battery designs using abundant domestic materials a reality.

BattMan is led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and includes Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as founding university partners including the University of Washington, Binghamton University, University of Alabama, Arizona State University, and University of Michigan-Dearborn. The consortium will also work closely with domestic companies across the battery and materials sector to test and validate manufacturing processes for commercially viable production.

“Alignment across battery manufacturing processes is critical to boost U.S. competitiveness and bring energy storage innovations to market,” said Donal Finegan, an NLR senior scientist. “Our researchers bring extensive experience in material qualification, advanced characterization, and electrode design to support the integrated approach of the BattMan consortium.”

In the near term, BattMan will implement high-throughput experimentation, automated synthesis and characterization, and digital manufacturing tools with the goal of improving data quality, reproducibility, and process consistency across partner institutions. Ultimately, the consortium aims to develop self-optimizing manufacturing systems using real-time data, automated feedback, and digital twin models that link virtual and real systems to identify opportunities to improve performance.

Accelerating Materials Qualification for Better-Performing Batteries

Before new battery materials can be used in commercial applications, they must undergo an extensive and time-consuming qualification process to ensure the final product performs consistently and safely across a full range of complex operational environments.

“Small changes in material behavior can have big system-level consequences,” said Katie Harrison, NLR battery materials group manager. “Our work uses physics-based insights to gain a better understanding of how the physical properties of electrode materials relate to cell performance in the field. Improved diagnostic processes can reveal failure pathways early and increase the speed from discovery to production.”

NLR researchers will establish physics-based machine learning models to analyze how specific defects and heterogeneities might impact cell performance years into the future, generating reliable data earlier in the development cycle. In addition, NLR will help guide validation workflows and metrics to quantify and record data to measure uniformity during manufacturing quality control.

These materials qualification improvements could help give industry the confidence needed to adopt new materials and manufacturing processes, reducing risk and accelerating the introduction of battery innovations that improve energy density, lifetime, or cost. 

Leveraging Super Intelligence To Improve Quality Control and Characterization

The highest-performing battery designs are carefully engineered, from atomic-scale chemistry to electrode manufacturing, coating, and assembly. Microscale batch variations in particle size, porosity, binder distribution, or interface morphology can dramatically affect battery behavior. Unfortunately, manufacturers lack the capabilities needed to measure critical defects effectively at the micrometer and sub-micrometer scale. This limits their ability to scale production and ensure consistent output.

By pairing super intelligence with advanced imaging and characterization techniques, NLR could turn microscale measurements into statistically representative insights that apply to entire batches of manufactured material. This means manufacturers could use NLR findings to assess the quality of their final products, without specialized equipment.

“Our work will focus on developing accessible, low-cost, high-throughput techniques and processes that unlock key information about the performance of manufactured materials, enabling both in-line and off-line quality control checks,” Finegan said. “These capabilities could help manufacturers improve quantitative insights to catch material defects and optimize processes.”

Digital Cell Design and Smart Manufacturing

Advanced computing techniques, such as digital cell design and “smart” manufacturing, have the potential to significantly alter modern battery manufacturing processes by evaluating how different electrode architecture decisions might affect cell performance before building a prototype. NLR’s long history in battery electrode design and multiphysics modeling will bring necessary expertise to help guide the consortium toward proven solutions. 

“Modeling is key to achieving first-time-right manufacturing, where we can digitally evaluate a wide range of battery electrode architectures faster and more efficiently,” said Andrew Colcasure, an NLR senior scientist. “NLR models could start with the ideal operational profile based and work backwards to help design electrode particle shaping, size distributions, and coating conditions.”

Supported by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office in the Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation Office, BattMan unites super intelligence, materials science, and advanced manufacturing for a data-driven innovation ecosystem. As part of this consortium, NLR and its partners are helping enable safer, more reliable, and faster deployment of next-generation battery solutions by moving transformative ideas from concept to commercial impact.

The National Laboratory of the Rockies is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, operated under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308.

David Glickson
National Laboratory of the Rockies
303-275-4097
David.Glickson@nlr.gov