The lack of large-scale energy storage bottlenecks many sources of renewable energy, such as sunlight-reliant solar power and unpredictable wind power. Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are working on changing that, leveraging an allocation on Argonne National Laboratory’s Theta supercomputer to better understand the dynamics of ion transport that are at the core of batteries and other energy storage systems.
In essence, the issue is that simulations of energy-storing materials are too perfect: or rather, the materials they simulate are too perfect. The imperfections found in real-world materials are key for ion transport, but are not typically well-captured by simulations of those materials.
“We want to understand these boundary regions, so we threw lots of high-performance computing power at it,” explained Brandon Wood, deputy director of…
Argonne Supercomputer Advances Energy Storage Research
