MdL Dr. Schütte visits the battery research sites in Ulm

Dr. Schütte, science policy spokesman of the CDU state parliamentary group and MdL Andreas Sturm visit the battery research site in Ulm

On January 16, 2023, Dr. Albrecht Schütte, member of the state parliament (science policy spokesman for the CDU state parliamentary group and member of the Committee for Science, Research and Arts), MdL Andreas Sturm and Tim Stephan, visited the energy research institutes at the Science Park in Ulm. After an exchange with the President of the University of Ulm, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Weber, as well as a tour of the campus of the University of Ulm and the Science Park Ulm, a visit at the Cluster of Excellence POLiS followed.

Prof. Maximilian Fichtner, spokesman of POLiS and director of CELEST, informed about the Cluster of Excellence and the Center for Electrochemical Energy Storage Ulm & Karlsruhe (CELEST), a research platform for scientific collaboration and technology transfer in the field of electrochemical energy storage (EES) from basic research to large-scale cell production and testing. After presenting the goals and developments achieved in the first funding phase of the Cluster, Prof. Axel Groß, spokesperson of POLiS and Institute Director at the Institute of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Ulm, addressed the second funding application of the POLiS Cluster of Excellence.

Then, tenure-track Prof. Helge Stein (KIT) gave a tour of the lab and explained the platform for accelerated materials development. This AI-supported system is not only capable of automatically synthesizing and assembling batteries and their individual components, but can even decide which experiment to perform next. Prof. Stein and his group have developed the combinatorial material synthesis, high-throughput characterization, and data mining techniques using AI methods in experiment evaluation and planning. The facility represents the first fully integrated Platform for Accelerated Electrochemical Energy Storage Research (PLACES/R).