NASA gives UMD team $1 million to develop battery for use in space

A team of University of Maryland researchers received $1 million in funding to move on to the second phase of a NASA development project. Its mission: build a better battery for space exploration.

The university team’s design was one of two selected to move on through the three-phase process to develop prototypes of batteries that future space missions could use. 

Batteries intended for use in space have some unique requirements, said Eric Wachsman, director of the university’s Energy Research Center.

The team must carefully control the battery’s mass, for instance.

“The heavier the payload, the more fuel they have to consume,” Wachsman said. “And it also has to be able to withstand extreme temperature conditions.”

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In space, a battery might be exposed to intense heat as it gets closer to the sun or extreme cold as it gets further from the sun, he said, and it has to be stable enough to endure both.

NASA wanted a safe design, said Chunsheng Wang, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor. The research team aimed to address some of the issues seen in traditional lithium-ion batteries and enhance stability, he said.

The researchers’ proposal is an all-solid-state battery that uses ceramic electrolytes, or electrically charged ions, Wachsman said. They designed it to resist burning and to have a high energy density, the amount of energy it can store relative to its size.

“There is a very big need across a lot of mission areas for advancing battery power,” said Chuck Taylor, a principal technologist with NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate.

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NASA has varying needs for higher-energy battery technology, Taylor said. A space-qualifiable battery could be used on a rover like Curiosity on Mars, or in a next-generation space suit.

Taylor said safety was an appealing element of the team’s lithium-sulfur technology.

“If you look at the history of lithium-ion technology, it has gone through several evolutions … and one of the problems is it had the capability to catch fire,” Taylor said.  

Safety is an important concern for NASA, he said, especially for manned missions. Aside from its solid-state stability, the lithium-sulfur battery design also promises to have a much higher energy density than lithium-ion technology, Taylor said.

Ultimately, the goal was to achieve a lighter, safer, more powerful technology, Wachsman said.

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After creating a prototype of the battery for the first phase of the competition, Wachsman said, the next step is “leveling up” the technology. Researchers will have to scale up the size of the cell and demonstrate that it can still meet energy requirements. They will also be testing the cell’s true temperature resistance in an environmental chamber, Wachsman said. 

Wachsman said that beyond space, there is plenty of potential for safe, high-energy battery designs. Batteries power much of the technology involved in people’s daily lives, he said, and though the team’s current designs focus more on performance than cost, there is potential for these batteries to eventually enter the consumer market.