Mission

Thrust 1: Unveil the mechanisms driving correlated alkali ion and proton transport in non-aqueous polymers.

Thrust 2: Elucidate the mechanisms controlling correlated ion transport at the polymer–ceramic interface and reducing interfacial ion transport barriers.

Crosscut: Design through computation, theory, and materials informatics.

Vision

The Center for Fast and Cooperative Ion Transport in Polymer-Based Electrolytes, or FaCT, was established as a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center in 2022. FaCT brings together a cross-cutting team of researchers from national laboratories and universities to develop a workflow to speed the design and discovery of materials that enable fast ion and proton transport, for batteries and fuel cells respectively. The project combines experimental and computational expertise across a broad range of length and timescales to collaborate on predictive modeling that will guide the design and synthesis of next-generation battery materials. 

Why Polymers?

Polymer-based electrolytes are promising materials for future energy storage and conversion technologies, including solid-state batteries and fuel cells. Solid polymer materials offer advantages in safety and performance over the liquid electrolytes used in today’s state-of-the-art batteries. Since their commercialization in the 1990s, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized handheld devices and paved the way for electric vehicles, or EVs. However, they have not been able to keep pace with evolving energy priorities for batteries with greater efficiency, reliability, and faster charging needed to achieve a future net-zero landscape. Bottlenecks center on the fundamental limitations of liquid electrolytes, which are inherently volatile and unstable, resulting in batteries that degrade over time and can pose safety risks. Polymer electrolytes avoid many of these challenges because they are made from nonflammable materials that are stable over broad temperature ranges, with added advantages in their flexibility, processability, and low cost, but their performance needs to be improved. The key to advancing polymer electrolytes is to discover candidates with high conductivity and selectivity to support fast ion transport. The library of discoverable polymers is so large, however, that materials discovery may be a long road without dedicated efforts to accelerate it.