Robots supercharging lab’s battery research

Eonix does cutting-edge work at lightning speed

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – At first glance, the Eonix lab looks like any other at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville: There are solutions in vials, whirring computers and glove boxes storing volatile materials in an oxygen-free environment.

But Eonix, a private company that discovers new battery materials and makes nonflammable lithium ion batteries, is unique.

In just 1,000 square feet, Eonix can go from idea to finished product in a fraction of the typical time and cost, thanks to custom-built robots and an advanced sensor. In the lab, a handful of scientists oversee selection and testing of new liquid electrolytes that alter a battery’s properties.

CEO Don DeRosa said there’s a “symphony” of chemical reactions happening every second inside a battery, and the same could be said for the lab, though it’s a quiet symphony of data and machines.

“We do have to have a few humans sprinkled in here and there, but overall from a productivity and workflow perspective, it’s predominantly automated,” DeRosa said. “It’s very relaxing as a scientist. We’re able to collect a lot of high-quality data, and the data itself is automatically processed.”

The end-to-end automated lab was the product of an early setback. Eonix was founded in 2014 by four students at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany, New York. After $500,000 and two years poured into a molecule for better batteries, DeRosa and his co-founders discovered it would be 600 times more expensive than the standard material.

So it was back to the drawing board, but with a new idea: Why not solve the larger problem, which is that it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to discover new materials, and many of them never end up in a battery?

The answer could not have come without Tennessee. With a two-year grant from the Department of Energy’s Innovations Crossroads program embedded at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the company moved to the Knoxville area in 2018.

After five years spent building an automated lab, now leased from the university, Eonix is sitting back and letting robots do some of the hardest work. The lab can do up to a year’s work on new materials in just eight days. Its accelerated materials discovery platform is envied by competitors who are trying to build their own.

Eonix plans to build a pilot manufacturing line in the next year, likely in Knoxville. Its customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, which wants lithium ion batteries that won’t explode in its planes or on its soldiers.

Here’s a glimpse into how the Eonix lab works and where it might go in a future where batteries are even more vital to the American automotive industry, energy grid and defense.

Developing lithium ion batteries, which power everything from smartphones to electric scooters and cars, requires handling many hazardous materials.

Any scientist who has worked in a glove box, a contraption that seals chemicals in a separate atmosphere accessible by unwieldy rubber gloves, knows how “gruesome” the process can be, to use DeRosa’s word.

Eonix built a custom robot that sits inside a glove box and can put together 32 samples in one run. A computer system suggests formulas for it to make after scanning through a catalog of tens of millions of chemical compounds.

The massive data model is accessible to Eonix through an exclusive partnership with Schrödinger, a software company that has helped pharmaceutical companies discover new drugs for decades and is expanding into materials science. The two companies announced the partnership in 2022.

In exchange for equity in Eonix, Schrödinger will provide $15 million worth of software, computer time and services over three years. Its learning models process the massive amounts of data that Eonix creates and feed it back into the lab.

After the glove box robot has produced liquid electrolyte samples, Eonix researchers put them into an off-theshelf robot that tests characteristics like their freezing point and how they would act in high elevations. If they pass the test, the solutions go into the company’s advanced sensor.

The sensor, called ATLAS, is the answer to the company’s early materials discovery woes. It can show Eonix what is going on inside the battery cell in real time, down to the flow of electrons. ATLAS can produce up to 7.2 terabytes, or around 7,200 gigabytes, of data per month. That’s way too much to handle, DeRosa said, so the machine now creates about half a terabyte of data per month.

ATLAS takes the guesswork out of the equation by showing Eonix how new materials actually function in batteries and why.

If a new liquid electrolyte passes all these tests, it can be injected into a battery cell. Eonix partners with battery manufacturers to get cells that are 99% finished, only needing the last liquid step.

Depending on the liquid, Eonix is able to change the properties of a battery to suit the needs of customers without having to change how the cell is built.

This breakthrough, along with the sensors Eonix puts directly into battery cells during testing, is a game changer. Its automated system allowed it to develop a nonflammable lithium ion battery in just four months.