UT Dallas teams with Argonne National Lab on battery research
image: Dr. Joseph Pancrazio (left), vice president for research and innovation at UT Dallas, and Argonne National Laboratory director Dr. Paul Kearns signed the memorandum of understanding on July 22.
Credit: The University of Texas at Dallas
The University of Texas at Dallas and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have agreed to collaborate on research to accelerate U.S. battery innovation and strengthen domestic supply chains for battery manufacturing.
Dr. Joseph Pancrazio, vice president for research and innovation and professor of bioengineering at UT Dallas, and Argonne National Laboratory director Dr. Paul Kearns signed the memorandum of understanding (MOU) on July 22 at Argonne’s Materials Engineering Research Facility in Lemont, Illinois.
As part of the MOU, researchers from UTD’s Batteries and Energy to Advance Commercialization and National Security (BEACONS) center will work with researchers from Argonne’s Advanced Energy Technologies directorate, which focuses on solving pressing energy, mobility, materials and manufacturing challenges.
“We are excited to enhance our partnership with the Argonne National Laboratory to advance energy storage technologies and facilitate U.S. battery manufacturing,” Pancrazio said. “By expanding our collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory researchers, we have the potential to drive advanced energy storage solutions from the bench to the marketplace.”
UT Dallas launched BEACONS in 2023 to develop and commercialize new battery technologies and manufacturing processes and to train workers for jobs in the energy-storage industry. The U.S. Department of Defense provided a $30 million award to establish an Energy Storage Systems Campus at UTD to drive solutions for researchers and industry partners.
The MOU will help UT Dallas and Argonne researchers work toward developing supplies of critical materials for domestic production of energy storage systems. Argonne also will engage UTD students in professional development opportunities to enrich the future workforce for energy storage and critical materials.
Through BEACONS, UTD also is collaborating with partners that include Associated Universities Inc. and LEAP Manufacturing, a consortium of energy storage companies working to develop and manufacture advanced battery technologies in the U.S. and with academic university partners. In April, BEACONS opened a battery prototyping facility to help researchers and industry partners facilitate energy storage innovation.