The Production Engineering of E-Mobility Components (PEM) chair at RWTH Aachen University, together with research and industry partners, has launched the Fast Battery Customization (FastBat) research cluster.
Backed by a 50 million euro grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, FastBat will run for three years under the Coal Region Structural Strengthening Act, supporting economic transformation in former coal regions through high-tech innovation.
FastBat aligns with the German government’s Hightech Agenda by fostering an independent, competitive battery and recycling value chain in the Rhineland region.
The cluster aims to bring innovations to market more quickly and with greater production flexibility, addressing the needs of sectors such as agriculture, aviation, mining and defense, which are pursuing a growing variety of electrified solutions.
The project is structured into five centers.
Center I, Fast Product Development, will accelerate development cycles and reduce resource use by employing data-driven simulation and artificial intelligence for rapid testing. It will also assess cell aging, safety and performance during early design phases to meet compliance standards.
Center II, Product Innovations, focuses on advancing battery and energy-management systems, exploring solid-state and sodium-ion technologies to improve power, capacity, safety and lifecycle.
Center III, Process Innovations, aims to industrialize energy-efficient manufacturing through a hybrid cell-production approach, continuing the development of inline coating and laser-drying processes controlled by new machine-learning models.
Center IV, Circular Economy, will establish local infrastructure for material recovery, refurbishment and reintegration, reducing carbon emissions and boosting recycling efficiency.
Center V, Implementation, will integrate outcomes from the other centers into industrial applications, support real-world labs, create an academy for knowledge transfer and launch a start-up support program to ensure a competitive battery ecosystem in the Rhineland.
PEM leads a consortium including RWTH Aachen chair groups, Fraunhofer FFB, the University of Münster’s MEET, Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences and industrial partners spanning engineering consultancies to recycling specialists.
Source: PEM RWTH Aachen Press Release
