Proposals are expected to contribute to all following points:

• Significantly enhanced competitiveness, resilience, and sustainability of the European battery cell manufacturing industry, achieving measurable reductions in capital expenditure (CAPEX), operational expenditure (OPEX), energy consumption, and environmental footprint compared to state-of-the-art processes.
• Demonstrated advanced manufacturing processes and equipment that substantially decrease battery production costs and improve overall production efficiency and battery quality.
• Established flexible and modular pilot production lines capable of efficiently transitioning between various battery chemistries and compositions, with demonstrated reduction in cross-contamination and effective management of sensitive materials.

Scope:

Proposals are expected to target the development and demonstration of innovative, next-generation battery cell manufacturing processes and machinery. These solutions are expected to explicitly focus on simultaneously achieving significant cost reductions and considerable decreases in energy consumption over the battery lifecycle, while maintaining or improving battery cell quality and sustainability metrics.

Proposals are expected to address all of the following:

• Demonstration of flexible, modular, and reconfigurable machinery to be integrated in manufacturing pilot lines that effectively accommodate transitions between various lithium-ion chemistries/compositions and sodium-ion chemistries.
• Development and demonstration novel mixing systems and novel electrode manufacturing techniques with advanced inline quality control
• Optimization of dry-room cell assembly processes, including the development and validation of advanced assembly equipment and techniques to significantly increase cell assembly throughput rates, reduce overall energy consumption associated with maintaining dry-room conditions, and enhance environmental controls
• Establishment of rapid and energy-efficient cell formation processes, significantly shortening formation and aging times compared to state of the art and enhancing quality assurance.
• Digitalisation of the production line, including in-line quality testing and identification of defects.
• Inclusion of comprehensive techno-economic assessments (TEA) and life-cycle analyses (LCA) to demonstrate clear environmental, economic, and scalability advantages over existing, state-of-the-art battery cell manufacturing practices.

The Commission initiative for Safe and Sustainable by Design^[1] (SSbD) sets a framework for assessing the safety and sustainability of chemicals and materials which should be considered as a reference for project proposals.

Whenever the expected exploitation of project results entails developing, creating, manufacturing and marketing a product or process, or in creating and providing a service, the plan for the exploitation and dissemination of results must include a strategy for such exploitation. The exploitation plans are expected to include preliminary plans for scalability, commercialisation, and deployment (feasibility study, business plan) indicating the possible funding sources to be potentially used (in particular the Innovation Fund).

Proposals could consider the involvement of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC)^[2] whose contribution could consist of performing experimental or desk-top research on battery performance or safety. For further information on the JRC’s possible contribution to the projects, please, search for additional publicly available information on the JRC’s website^[3] (EU Science Hub) on the NCP portal, or request specific information from the JRC (JRC-NCP-Network@ec.europa.eu)

JRC will assure that all the other applicants receive the same information on the JRC’s possible contribution to the project (e.g., via the topic-specific FAQs under the Funding and Tenders Portal).

This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership on Batteries (Batt4EU). As such, projects resulting from this topic will be expected to report on the results to the European Partnership on Batteries (Batt4EU) in support of the monitoring of its KPIs.

[1] https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/research-area/industrial-research-and-innovation/key-enabling-technologies/chemicals-and-advanced-materials_en

[2] https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/laboratories-z/battery-energy-storage-testing_en

[3] JRC NCP | Horizon Europe NCP Portal