Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a higher education and research organisation with nearly 10,000 employees, 25,000 students, and a total annual budget of over 860 million €. It bundles the missions of two precursory institutions: a university of the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg with teaching and research tasks and a large-scale research institution of the Helmholtz Association conducting program-oriented research on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany. KIT is operating along the three strategic fields of action of research, teaching, and innovation. In establishing innovative research structures, KIT is pursuing joint strategies and visions. KIT is devoted to top research and excellent academic education as well as to being a prominent location of academic life, life-long learning, comprehensive advanced training, exchange of know-how, and sustainable innovation culture. KIT’s research profile is characterised by a strong focus on energy technology, nanotechnology and materials research, as well as climate and environmental research. It has significant competencies in the fields of information and communication technologies, mobility systems, optics and photonics, and the inter-relations of humans and technology.

About 110 researchers are working at the Helmholtz-Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage, HIU. The Materials Department at HIU has developed novel synthesis methods for energy storage materials based on conversion materials and intercalation materials. Storage materials dispersed on the nanoscale have been produced as functional nanocomposites with dedicated coatings, and functional additives. Active materials for electrodes have been embedded in microstructures, which allow for a stable transfer of both electronic and ionic charges through battery materials.

The group has presented several original approaches for new types of batteries based on anionic shuttles such as fluoride and chloride ion batteries and of novel electrolytes which allow operation of secondary Mg-S batteries. Moreover, novel approaches have been presented for development of cathode conversion electrodes with high cyclic stability and of carbon-sulfur composites which can be cycled without the formation of detrimental polysulfides.

Recently, it was shown that a cathode material based on an oxyfluoride with a cubic closed packed structure can reversibly exchange up to 1.8 Li+ per formula unit, reaching unprecedented values, especially in volumetric energy densities. The paradigm change in storing Li ions opens a new field of exploration on a new materials class which has been termed “Li-rich FCC” materials. The exploration of this new way of storing Li in extremely dense packing is the topic of the LiRichFCC project.

CEA is a French government-funded technological research organization with more than 15,000 employees. Its activities cover four main areas: (i) energy, (ii) defense & security, (iii) health & information technologies, and (iv) fundamental research.

The CEA centers involved in this project are the CEA Le Ripault (CEA-LR) located near Tours, and the CEA-LITEN located in Grenoble. The CEA-LITEN (Laboratory for Innovation in New Energy Technologies and nanomaterials) employs around. 1,000 people working on energy R&D (fuel cell, batteries, biomass, and solar application). It has more than 10 years of experience in new materials for Li-ions batteries. Today, this entity is equipped with different platforms. The materials platform include a great variety of dryers and ovens (spraydryer, static batch furnaces, turning reactor furnace, and a new conveyer furnace), solvothermal reactors, and ball-millers with increasing capacities, from a few grams to several kg allowing facilitating technological transfer of new compounds.

The CEA-LR is dedicated to high performance and energetic materials (modelling, elaboration and testing). The center specializes in the chemical development of technical polymers, innovative monomers, and solvents and has acquired world-leading expertise in the synthesis of new solvents, the development of electrolytes, and post-mortem analysis (studies on decomposition of electrolyte compounds) for various battery technologies. The CEA-LR is also operating a dedicated battery security testing platform.

The CEA’s intellectual properties portfolio on Li-ion batteries is extensive (more than 100 patents) on the topics of material synthesis, electrolytes, battery architecture, and BMS.

The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is a leading Scandinavian technical university and part of the Euro Tech University Alliance and Nordic Five Tech. Among other things, the University has extensive expertise within the areas of battery materials and mechanisms, heterogeneous and electro-catalysis as well as computational materials design. The DTU activities are led by the Department for Energy Conversion and Storage (DTU Energy Conversion) focusing on the development of new technologies and materials for energy conversion and storage, i.e. fuel and solar cells, membranes, magnetic refrigeration and thermoelectrics, electrolysis and synthetic fuels, hydrogen storage and batteries. DTU Energy Conversion has core competencies within: electrochemistry; ion, defect and atomic transport in solids; functional ceramics and polymers; production and modelling processes; advanced testing; characterization of crystal, nano and micro structures; large facilities; as well as computer-based materials design and modelling.

The PIs are part of the Center for Atomic scale Materials Design (CAMD), which is a world leading center in the development of electronic structure theory to understand the properties of materials and use the insight to design new functional nanostructures. Computational competences: computational prediction of fundamental reaction mechanisms and overvoltages for metal-air batteries; calculate ionic, vacancy and electronic transport; using methods based on density function theory (DFT) and Non-Equilibrium Green’s Function (NEGF) theory.

The Kemijski Institut, Ljubljana, Slovenia has close to 300 employees of which around 250 carry out research work in 17 laboratories and two infrastructure centres; 130 of these have doctorates of science degrees. Basic and applied researches are oriented towards fields which are of long-term importance to both Slovenia and EU: biotechnology, environmental protection, structural and theoretical chemistry, analytical chemistry, materials research, and chemical engineering through which the Institute is in line with the needs of the domestic and international chemical, pharmaceutical and food industries.

The battery group in the Laboratory for Materials Chemistry at KI is currently coordinating two EU projects on Li-S batteries and it has several domestic and international industrial contracts. Our focus is mainly on modern battery systems. Equipment available in the group is based on needs for laboratory scale battery research (from materials synthesis to characterisation and testing in laboratory scale batteries).

Uppsala University, founded in 1477, is the oldest University in the Nordic countries. In all different ranking lists UU is among the top 100 universities in the world. Today, it trains more than 43000 students, and employs 6000 people. There are about 2500 active graduate students; 44% of these are women. Each year, the University awards some 270 doctoral degrees.

The Ångstrom Advanced Battery Centre is an integral part of the Department of Chemistry – Ångström Laboratory, Uppsala University; it is housed within the Ångström Laboratory – one of Europe’s best equipped Materials Research Laboratories. The Centre involves the full-time activities of 35-40 researchers, of whom 6 are Senior Staff; the remainders are PhD students and postdocs. It is the leading basic research environments for the development of electrochemical storage materials and advanced battery technology in the Nordic countries. It is a member of SHC (The Swedish Hybrid Vehicle Centre). The focus is on modern Li- and Na-ion based batteries (Li-ion, Li-S, Li-O, Na-ion, etc.). The expertise lies in synthesis of electrode and electrolyte materials but equally important are the development of operando structural characterisation techniques but also surface science techniques such as photoelectron spectroscopy and XANES.