Two new projects will begin next month, aiming to advance battery formation, ageing and testing for efficient and sustainable manufacturing
The Faraday Institution – the UK’s flagship battery programme – has announced an additional £9m to build on its application-inspired research efforts.
Photo by Roberto Sorin / Unsplash
The money will fund two pioneering projects, both due to start in October 2025 and are expected to run until September 2028. (Funding beyond March 2027 will be confirmed in early 2026.)
One project is ‘Advancing Battery Formation, Ageing, and Testing for Efficient Manufacturing and Sustainability’ or FAST, which aim to improve the process of manufacturing lithium-ion batteries by better understanding the science that underlies it. Manufacture of these batteries is time, energy and cost intensive, and development to date has largely been through empirical optimisation. The team behind the project think that a better understanding of the mechanistic scientific detail will result in significant advances.
This project is led by Professor Emma Kendrick from the University of Birmingham, supported by researchers from the Universities of Warwick, Cambridge, Nottingham and Oxford, as well as four industry partners and the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC).
The other project, ‘Accelerated Development of Next Generation Lithium-rich 3D Cathode Materials’, or 3D-CAT, aims to enable significant advances in future lithium-ion battery performance by developing new cathode materials that work better and are cheaper and more abundant than lithium iron phosphate (LFP), lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP) and lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxides (NMC).
The project is led by Dr Robert House from the University of Oxford, in partnership with the University College London, four industry partners and the AMBIC materials scale-up facility at CPI.
These new projects will run alongside other application-inspired, multidisciplinary and multi-university research projects under the Faraday Institution research programme. These cover such areas as battery degradation, modelling, recycling, safety, electrode manufacturing, as well as next-generation chemistries such as lithium-sulphur, sodium-ion and solid-state batteries.
The Faraday Institution has already established a community of more than 500 researchers from 25 UK universities and 147 industry partners to help to inform research directions and accelerate routes to market. The new announcement of funding builds on a previous investment of £183m since 2018 in the organisation’s portfolio of main projects.
In June 2025, the Department for Business and Trade announced a multi-year £452m investment in the Battery Innovation Programme (formerly the Faraday Battery Challenge) as part of the government’s Advanced Manufacturing Sector Plan.
Sarah Jones MP, Minister for Industry, says: ‘Through our modern industrial strategy, we’re going further than ever before to back industry, with the biggest package of investments ever launched by a British government to turbocharge growth. With this funding we’re ensuring we stay at the cutting edge of innovation by backing scale-ups, research and fast-tracking new technologies to market, helping unlock new growth and investment as part of our Plan for Change.’
Professor Martin Freer, CEO of the Faraday Institution, adds: ‘The UK’s sustained investment in research at its world-leading universities is unlocking transformative battery discoveries that, when translated into industry, will drive major advances in performance across multiple sectors. The government’s long-term commitment ensures that breakthroughs move from the lab to commercial application, fuelling economic growth, and creating high-value jobs for the future.’
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