Sandia recently received a Best Booth award for exceptional content, engagement and innovation at the 2025 ARPA-E Summit held in March. The award was presented to the Sandia team during the ARPA-E EVs4ALL Annual Meeting in Detroit.
The award-winning booth showcased an innovative framework for the safety evaluation of batteries.
While performance and cost are typically the key motivators behind battery chemistries and cell designs, Sandia’s framework evaluates battery safety throughout the entire cell development process. Incorporating safety evaluations early and continuously has the potential to save development time and costs while reducing the risk of catastrophic failures, thereby improving overall safety.
Sandia’s framework outlines a combined testing methodology and modeling approach that evaluates the safety of advanced battery materials and cells through a synergistic blend of experimental characterization and multi-scale modeling. This bottom-up approach to battery safety is designed to de-risk battery development and expedite commercialization of emerging technologies. The innovative methodology predicts safety characteristics from readily obtainable parameters, such as materials properties and/or small-scale experiments requiring minimal quantities of material, promising to revolutionize battery development for both academia and industry. The final deliverable of the program will be a Multi-Scale Safety Testing Manual, which details the combined experimental methodology and modeling framework for determining a scaled-up safety profile. This manual will include a hazard severity scale, providing an informed understanding of a technology’s safety outlook. Additionally, the modeling component will offer guidance on how cell materials and formats influence safety.
August 12, 2025