Breakthrough Battery Formation Protocol Halves Processing Time—Accepted in Advanced Digital Discovery

A major advancement in lithium-ion battery production has just been accepted for publication in Advanced Digital Discovery, a new journal by Wiley focusing on data-driven and computational advances in materials and chemical research. The study, titled “Information-Dense and Industry-Scalable Accelerated Formation”, proposes a transformative method for battery formation—a critical, time- and energy-intensive step in cell manufacturing. Spearheaded by researchers from the Helmholtz Institute Ulm and the Stein Lab at KIT, the paper introduces pulsed formation as a novel strategy that reduces formation time by over 50% while maintaining or even enhancing all key performance parameters of the cells. Battery formation typically involves long, low-current charging cycles to develop a stable solid electrolyte interphase (SEI), crucial for long-term performance. This conventional approach is not only time-consuming and costly but also occupies vast manufacturing floor space. While existing attempts to accelerate formation—such as raising temperatures or increasing charging currents—often compromise cell quality, the new method overcomes these limitations. The pulsed formation protocol described in the paper introduces tailored current pulses during formation, leading to thinner, more homogeneous SEI layers due to a finely tuned balance between surface and bulk diffusion processes. The result: full-cell performance is preserved or improved, even as processing time is slashed. Importantly, the authors validated their findings by scaling the method to 25Ah prismatic cells in the PHEV1 format—demonstrating its industrial viability. The strategy is not just faster; it also yields information-dense data during formation, allowing the early extraction of cell quality markers and opening new pathways for process analytics and AI-driven cell characterization. The work has been patented under WO2024170596A1 and gained significant public attention after being featured in the Geladen Podcast episode titled “Günstigere Batterien durch Trick in der Produktion”, where Prof. Helge Stein discusses its disruptive potential in reducing battery production costs and accelerating gigafactory throughput. The podcast episode is available on YouTube here. This paper marks an exciting debut for Advanced Digital Discovery, showcasing how digitally informed experimentation and scalable lab-to-industry innovation can reshape foundational steps in clean energy technology.