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UCL joins forces with Aceleron to reduce battery waste in electric cars
10 November 2021
As the UK hosts COP26, UCL announces a new partnership to help Aceleron improve the way their batteries work for electric vehicles.
UCL is working with battery manufacturers Aceleron on a sustainability-focused knowledge transfer partnership (KTP), worth £140,000. The project will enable the business to tap into the latest sustainability expertise at the university, to optimise their recyclable battery technology for electric vehicles.
Aceleron is an award-winning battery technology company based in the West Midlands.
The company started when the co-founders dismantled and tested hundreds of battery packs and realised that the batteries weren’t designed to be maintained or recycled. Anticipating a future with tonnes of unnecessary battery waste, they developed the world’s most sustainable lithium batteries, which can be serviced, upgraded and recycled.
In their KTP with UCL, they’re now looking to improve the way their batteries work for electric vehicles, a huge potential market for their products.
Professor Dan Brett (Professor of Electrochemical Engineering), from UCL’s Department of Chemical Engineering, is the lead academic on the project, with Dr James Robinson (Senior Research Fellow).
Dan explains: “Battery waste from the electric vehicle market is projected to be 22 million tonnes a year by 2040. Aceleron are tackling this problem with sustainable lithium battery packs. But because of the way these are made, using mechanical compression rather than glue, there is scope to optimise the design, increasing the lifetime and power possible from the batteries.”
The KTP project will allow Aceleron to tap into specialist expertise from UCL’s Electrochemical Innovation Lab (EIL), the largest electrochemical research lab in the UK.
The batteries developed through the KTP will be designed for reuse, creating a circular economy, and reducing emissions and battery waste associated with electric vehicles.
Read the full story on the UCL Innovation & Enterprise website
Links
- Job vacancy for KTP Associate: Sustainable Electric Vehicle Battery Development
- Aceleron
- UCL Climate Hub: a community for change
- UCL Chemical Engineering
- Grow your business through a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP)
- UCL staff: work with businesses on a KTP
- KTP: DesignBuilder joins forces with UCL to lead the way in building performance assessment and modelling
- Professor Dan Brett's academic profile