We need to stop looking backward at incomplete datasets and start building semantic standards for the future.

That is the focus of our new initiative, the Faraday Engine. Mission One is Health; we are working hard to ensure Energy is ready to follow in 2026. 🔋

We have petabytes of legacy data, but it is mostly "What" (characterisation data). To build predictive battery models, we need the "How" (synthesis, thermal history).

Without that semantic link, GenAI cannot learn the recipe. It sees the destination but doesn't know the route. 2/3

This was a huge team effort, so massive thanks to my co-authors and the teams at @psich.bsky.social, ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, The Faraday Institution, and Diamond Light Source. Go read the paper!

By reinforcing that one part so well, we just forced the system to break somewhere else. The failure moved to the counter electrode, which cracked on the next cycle.

It's a powerful lesson: you can't just improve one piece of a battery. You have to think about the whole system. #HolisticDesign

Cell B (with the silver layer) was a different story. The Ag layer made the lithium plate beautifully. The interface was perfect, even at high currents. A total success!

...or so we thought.

4/6

As expected, Cell A (bare copper) failed fast. Lithium plated unevenly, creating stress that cracked the solid electrolyte.

3/6

We built two solid-state cells.

Cell A: Standard copper current collector

Cell B: Copper collector with a tiny 50nm silver layer

Then we watched them work (and fail) in 3D using synchrotron X-rays at @diamondlightsource.bsky.social 2/6

It's the same fundamental challenge: a growing tip penetrating a harder material. The method to map how roots navigate soil can now help us understand how dendrites cause catastrophic failure in batteries. 4/4

#TranslationalResearch #SoilScience #Biomimicry #SolidStateBatteries #EnergyStorage

But as a battery scientist, this is where it gets really exciting. While the article focuses on agriculture, the technique is a perfect demonstration of translational research. We can use it to understand a huge challenge: stopping dendrites in solid-state batteries. 3/4

To see this underground engineering, we took our experiment to the @diamondlightsource.bsky.social synchrotron. The article covers our work using dual X-ray techniques on the #DIAD beamline to visualise the forces at play. 2/4

Means we can study architectured graphite, NMC, Na-ion Al-ion, and solid-state all in one experiment. Huge thank you to Dominic Spencer-Jolly, Emily Lu, Christoph Rau, and Shashi Marathe for making this possible.

A huge thank you to both for funding this research, and to Diamond Light Source and the peer review panel for allowing us the beamtime to make this happen

The method is v generic, so could be applied to hemp, how seaweeds anchor to the seabed, how worms burrow etc. etc. Anything that's pushing through soil structures