Today’s high-performance materials are increasingly complex and face stringent cost targets. Developing a laboratory discovery into an innovative product that can be manufactured at scale takes years of research, multiple layers of scientific and engineering depth, and significant capital investment.
Argonne accelerates and de-risks this gap between discovery and commercialization by developing scalable, efficient processes for manufacturing innovative materials. As a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory, Argonne draws upon a wide range of expertise across scientific and engineering disciplines, with the concentration of experts and facilities needed to successfully scale up materials and processes from grams in a laboratory to kilograms in industrial manufacturing.
Argonne’s scientists and engineers work in the Materials Engineering Research Facility (MERF) with a suite of traditional and innovative process technologies. These processes can be augmented with advanced characterization, sophisticated modeling, and cutting-edge machine learning tools that reduce the time and cost required to develop a process capable of producing a high-quality material in commercially relevant quantities. Argonne also conducts material performance testing to ensure it is qualified for its proposed commercial purpose.
Example: How We Collaborate
Materials scientists at the MERF are developing gas-phase combustion synthesis to produce materials for solid state batteries. In collaboration with Argonne experts and Cabot Corporation, researchers lowered the manufacturing cost of the material by modifying the process to use more readily available precursors. This is emblematic of Argonne’s ability to apply its scientific and technical expertise in support of U.S. manufacturing competitiveness.