Our leadership team and other l researchers discuss their stories about turning lab research into commercial scale technologies
What drives entrepreneurial scientists to take an idea discovered in the lab and turn it into a business, especially in areas where other companies have failed?
The transition doesn’t happen in a puff of magic or a single eureka moment. “These companies don’t just come out of the ether from one unexpected lab development. There are many steps along the way,” says Paul V. Braun, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), who cofounded Xerion Advanced Battery, where he serves as chief technology officer. The idea to launch a start-up may not sprout suddenly, but there are often decisive moments that drive the germination process.
For Xerion, which is located near Dayton, Ohio, one of those moments came when researchers discovered a valuable method for depositing battery materials on a metal current collector—an important step in making batteries. For SES, a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a major advance resulted from MIT researchers figuring out how to make a safe electrolyte for batteries that feature metallic lithium electrodes. And for Nanotech Energy, which grew out of advances made at the University of California, Los Angeles, one turning point was when scientists realized that their novel form of graphene was an outstanding electrode material.
In each of these cases, the researchers recognized that their discoveries could be the start of something big. These companies have long moved past prototypes and early pilot-scale studies. They have partnered with large, well-known companies and have raised millions of dollars. If all goes well, their batteries may soon end up in electric vehicles and other types of brand-name consumer products.
Moving beyond an initial discovery requires a lot of confidence and a major investment of time, effort, and money. But that’s not enough to ensure that a company will do well. Timing is also critical. One of the keys to launching a successful start-up is anticipating an important need—such as powerful batteries to electrify transportation—long enough in advance to do the necessary R&D to win investor confidence in a company’s ability to compete in the market.
Here we explore how the story of these three companies unfolded.
At UIUC, Braun’s group had been working on well-ordered porous materials in the early 2000s. The studies initially focused on depositing semiconductors in the materials’ pores to make 3D photonic crystals for light-driven microelectronics. By the end of the decade, the researchers had pivoted to metallic structures. They came up with a way to make 3D porous metals and coat them with electroactive materials, the kinds used in batteries. That finding, which Braun patented, suggested an inexpensive route to making batteries that could be charged and discharged faster than commercial lithium-ion ones.
Enter John Busbee. Busbee had completed his PhD work with Braun years earlier and had served as the nanotechnology program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. In that role, he was involved in research at the early stages of nanoscience, when researchers everywhere were extolling the virtues of nanostructured materials and their endless potential for killer applications.
“There was a lot of hype in the industry back then,” Busbee says. “But the 5% that was real had so much potential. I wanted to make nanotechnology practical.” The materials advances at UIUC made by Braun’s group looked like a great start, he thought. So in 2010, Busbee cofounded Xerion, became its CEO, and set about the business of building a company—raising funds, licensing technology from UIUC, and assembling a team of researchers and financial experts to advance the battery know-how toward commercialization.
One scientific finding in particular propelled the young company’s technology forward. Xerion researchers, together with coworkers at UIUC, came up with a simple, one-step procedure for coating metal current collectors with lithium cobalt oxide, lithium manganese oxide, and related electrode materials at the heart of Li-ion batteries (Sci. Adv. 2017, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1602427). That method, based on electrodeposition, or electroplating, was simpler and faster and operated at lower temperature than other common deposition methods.
With additional R&D, Xerion soon had two core technologies—StructurePore, for making porous, nanostructured metal foams, and DirectPlate, for depositing electroactive battery materials. Together, they provide the company with ways to make Li-ion batteries that offer numerous performance and manufacturing advantages over standard commercial versions.
"These companies don’t just come out of the ether from one unexpected lab development. There are many steps along the way."
Paul V. Braun, materials scientist, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and CTO, Xerion Advanced Battery
For example, the electrodes’ networks of interconnected pores and channels speed up transport of lithium ions through the battery and lower its internal resistance, boosting performance relative to batteries with nonporous electrodes. And the thin, porous electrode structure accommodates ion shuttling without the swelling and shrinking that often cracks other types of electrodes and eventually causes them to fail.
Xerion’s electroplating method provides additional advantages over existing electrode-making processes. Most battery makers start with costly, high-purity metal oxides, add carbon black to increase conductivity and an organic binder to serve as a glue, then cast the mixture as a slurry on an aluminum-foil current collector. The carbon black and binder play a role in this mixture but they don’t store charge and they add to battery weight.
Xerion uses low-cost, unrefined precursors, skips the carbon black and binder, and doesn’t deposit the electroactive battery material as a slurry. Instead, the company’s scientists dissolve lithium, cobalt, manganese, and other metal precursors in an electroplating bath. Then they switch on an electrodeposition process that forms high-purity oxides as it runs and directly plates the material on the current collector. Overall, the method lowers material costs, simplifies manufacturing, and leads to batteries with up to 20% more active battery material, which increases energy density and other performance characteristics.
“We’re using electroplating, which is a 150-year-old manufacturing technique, to make advanced batteries,” Busbee says. That approach enables the company to work directly with US mines to obtain low-purity minerals and bypass costly refinement steps. It also simplifies battery recycling because the batteries contain fewer components than traditional ones. Although Busbee is not yet prepared to share names and details, he notes that Xerion is “working with large, well-established companies in the automotive and electronics industries” and has “joint development agreements coming to realization very shortly.”
When asked about his level of optimism when he started the company, Busbee laughs. He points out that when he and the other cofounders were getting serious about licensing technology and fundraising, A123 Systems, a promising battery spin-off from MIT that had hundreds of millions of dollars in backing and some 2,500 employees, looked as if it was about to go bankrupt. (It went bankrupt in 2012.)
“People asked me ‘Why on earth would you start a battery company now?’ ” He answered—“You don’t start a company when things look good. You start them when they look bad, with the aim that when you’re ready to start manufacturing, things will be in good shape” and the market will be ready for your product. As he considers Xerion’s prospects today, Busbee says, “It seems like that plan is working out fortuitously.”
