The BESTAR Program comprises state-of-the-art research facilities throughout Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Research facilities within the EETD’s Electrochemical Technologies Group’s include fully equipped labs for performing diagnostic testing of battery materials, a fully equipped lab-scale battery fabrication lab for assembling and testing batteries and fuel cells of varying experimental chemistries and architectures including but not limited to
- Materials synthesis (furnaces capable of working under various gases, microwave ovens, centrifuges, spray pyrolyzer, etc…)
- Materials characterization (field emission SEM equipped with EDS and STEM detectors, diffractometers, mass spectrometer, ICP, TGA, micro-Raman spectroscopy and imaging, spectroscopic ellipsometry, FTIR spectroscopy and microscopy, near-field IR spectroscopy and imaging, etc …)
- Electrode testing (Instron mechanical testing, adhesion, permeability, ionic conductivity, etc …)
- Cell fabrication (coin cells, pouch cells), • Battery and flow battery testing equipment (multi-channels potentiostats and galvanostats, etc…), • Advanced surface diagnostic equipment (ex-situ and in-situ)
In addition, principal investigators have access to National Users Facilities such as NCEM (National Center for Electron Microscopy) and ALS (Advanced Light Source). This density of state-of-the-art tools and techniques is unsurpassed in the country.