by Katie Liu
The free two-day seminar takes place in RIT’s Battery Development Center
In the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Battery Development Center, you might walk into one dry lab and find coating equipment that is silver, steely and as tall as the ceiling. There, battery technicians concoct thick, black slurry, like batter, in bulky mixing machines that look like they came out of industrial kitchens. In the room just next door, machines lining the walls like an arcade hiss and hum as they wrap up cylindrical and pouch cells alike.
Exploring these labs and capabilities is par for the course at RIT’s two-day lithium-ion cell manufacturing seminar, which is offered in partnership between RIT and New Energy New York. More than 400 participants and 200 companies have attended the 13 seminars offered so far, ranging from major corporations like Kodak and ExxonMobil to startups still establishing their footholds in the field.
“I’ve got these 20-year veterans, but I also get kids that are fresh co-ops. These are young kids who are just coming into the battery space,” said Michael Miller, program manager at RIT’s BDC. “We have a broad, broad range of people, and they all get something out of it.”
RIT began offering these seminars to provide basic training for people who were looking to enter the lithium-ion industry. But when NENY came into the picture — after winning the U.S. Economic Development Administration’s Build Back Better Regional Challenge in 2022 — its funding helped RIT expand its seminars in education and reach.
Early this January, at least 20 participants arrived from either down the road from RIT’s campus or out of state for RIT’s winter seminar. They walked into the classroom each carrying varying levels of experience in the battery industry, for two days of lectures on the latest developments in the field as well as hands-on training in the BDC — all free of cost.
“What the seminar offers is a more holistic view of every step of manufacturing, all the way from powder to finished cell, through testing,” said Anthony Leggiero, battery prototyping lead and research engineer at BDC.
Ensuring that this overview is accessible to anyone who wishes to attend, whether they’re longtime experts or newcomers to the industry, was a top priority in formulating the program. A seminar of this caliber would normally be highly expensive, particularly for students and startups early in their journeys, according to Miller. Covering those out-of-pocket costs allows participants to solely focus on squeezing all the knowledge they can out of two days.
“We’ve had some startup companies that are in New York that have attended our training, and have been established startup companies for years. And they said, ‘We’ve learned so much. We wish we could have taken this years ago, and we’d be so much further along in our development and our product if we had this training available earlier,’” said Matthew Ganter, assistant research professor of chemical engineering and director of the BDC.
The seminar, however, isn’t solely limited to those already in the battery industry. Folks specializing in defense, business and safety can attend the seminars for a new perspective on their own work. They can see how the cells they’re usually only testing are made, or peer inside a battery they’re typically trying to put out.
“One of the comments [from the fire safety departments that came by] that stuck out to me is, ‘I’ve never seen a cell that isn’t shooting out the top currently or making confetti,’” Leggiero said. “He was like, ‘I didn’t realize it was so neat, and how the spiral looks inside a cylindrical cell when it hasn’t burst.’” It also gives them an understanding of what goes into the cell, what can also go wrong with the cells, and how we avoid those issues — how we make better, safer, more reliable batteries.”
Naturally collaborative, not competitive
When putting a small group of battery professionals together over the course of almost 48 hours, it’s natural to not only learn from lecturers, but also each other. For Sailifa Nzwalo, senior business analyst at the lithium-ion battery company Farasis Energy, she arrived in Rochester looking to meet others in the same field who hold different perspectives and positions than herself.
“We live in a world where we take so many things for granted, where we don’t know where things are coming from and how we can develop something. Especially if you are someone who cares about the environment, ethics, the future and future generations,” said Nzwalo, whose work also prioritizes women’s perspectives in the battery field and market. “Renewable energy is the future for all of us. It’s something we have to start now and invest more and more time in, so I think people should really consider doing this seminar.”
The spirit of the seminar is first and foremost collaborative, Leggiero added, not competitive.
“It naturally offers that sort of networking you’d find at a bigger conference. But because we aren’t a huge conference, you get a lot more one-on-one time with people you might not otherwise be able to talk to at length,” he said.
What New York state has to offer
It takes a village — or in this case, an entire ecosystem — to put together a program like this. While NENY is a coalition of universities, non-profits, government and industry partners, RIT additionally brings in experts from all sorts of backgrounds, including cell fabrication and solid state battery research, to present their work and findings.
“We have startups here and in Binghamton, with the Koffman Southern Tier Incubator,” Miller said. “The whole nine yards. Everything kind of comes together.”
Since its inception, Miller has seen the interest in the seminar grow exponentially. Spots fill up quickly after registration opens, and the content grows in tandem to reflect the growing ranks and resumes of its participants.
“We teach everybody. We don’t want it to go over anybody’s head,” BDC research and engineering technician Joseph Luckenbach said. “We always like to start with the battery basics and really try to make sure we can get everybody up to speed and that nobody gets left behind.”
As the team at RIT BDC looks forward to further developing the program, including potentially expanding the number of seats available, adding more downstream and safety testing training or even offering similar teachings to high school students, Miller hopes companies will continue learning about the ecosystem built around battery technology in New York state.
“We’ve got people here from Volkswagen, Nissan, ExxonMobil,” he said, “and they’re checking out what our capabilities are.”
A positive charge and change
While data centers grow and electric vehicles soar in the market, the need for energy storage in safe and efficient batteries is becoming more and more pertinent. Ganter sticks with the forward-charge to share not only his language of batteries, but also the industry experience he has gained.
“We’re sharing 10 years of experience in developing new materials and scaling them up, which is almost invaluable to a lot of these companies or people that are new in the industry,” he said. “[We want them to] see a lot of the nuances and details and tricks and our internal, almost trade secrets, in the way we share with people during these seminars and are open with, so that they can hopefully develop the next best battery.”
If the seminar is collaborative in nature, the same can be said for the coalition behind putting it together. Being part of a grander team, Ganter said, is reinvigorating, especially when working with technology that presents so many possibilities as well as things that can go wrong.
Nobody has made the “golden battery that does everything,” he added — yet. But seeing progress and improvements in the technology, no matter how incremental, is the rewarding part of the work.
“You also see other companies make these gains and strides and work with us, then they eventually graduate from our facility, and end up commercializing and growing. They sort of leave us,” he said. “And that’s the ultimate goal — it’s to almost put ourselves out of business, where they hopefully become so successful that they don’t need us anymore. But it’s exciting to have a small part in that.”
Beyond the zero cost and varying expertise offered, he added, what really makes this program special are the scientists and technicians running it.
“I like to say it this way: The Battery Development Center has some real horses,” Miller said. “And I want people to see my horses run. Guys like Matt and Anthony and Joe know their stuff. They’re experienced. They’ve done a tremendous amount of work in the area, and they’ve been doing it for many, many years.”
RIT will have more battery seminar opportunities later on in the year, and when available, registration can be found on its website.