Washington Clean Energy Testbeds

The Scale-up & Characterization lab at the Testbeds offers a platform for prototyping authentic-scale solar and storage devices as well as testing manufacturing processes. The lab includes a 30-ft-long multistage roll-to-roll printer for solar cells, batteries, sensors, optical films, and thin-film devices and is the only one of its kind available in the United States.

The Scale-up & Characterization lab also includes a controlled humidity and temperature room to enable specialized fabrication under precise atmospheric conditions. The collection of characterization instruments in the lab form a unique roster of capabilities tailored specifically for supporting scaled energy devices and modules. They allow for rigorous testing of new devices using solar simulators, environmental test chambers, battery cyclers, electron microscopes, X-ray spectrometers and other instruments.

The Systems Integration lab at the Testbeds provides an evaluation platform for testing the performance of energy devices and algorithms when integrated into real and simulated system environments. For example, a real-time digital simulator (RTDS) allows for modeling commercial and grid-scale system performance under normal and extreme conditions. System integration experiments using the RTDS can involve new software algorithms that control or optimize power infrastructure. The lab also includes flexible power hardware and battery storage devices up to 40 kW in scale, allowing authentic testing at the scale of an electric vehicle or commercial building.

As part of the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds system, the Research Training Testbed facility provides UW students access to research-quality tools and training in clean energy concepts that cut across academic disciplines. CEI Member Faculty teach an interdisciplinary energy lab course in the space, and Testbeds users can access the additional instrumentation when not in use for teaching purposes. The RTT is located in the Nanoengineering and Sciences (NanoES) building at 3946 W Stevens Way NE on the UW campus.

Opening summer 2025: A new battery lab at the Washington Clean Energy Testbeds will provide pay-per-use open access to a world-class pilot-scale pouch cell production line, enabling innovators from both academia and industry to prototype dozens of commercially relevant pouch cell batteries — from material processing to formation and testing. This lab will fill a critical gap between lab-scale research and commercial cell production, allowing for more rapid validation of new battery materials and cell architectures.

The 1,600 ft² space will include a dry room (-40°C dew point) with tools for electrode slurry mixing, material coating, and pouch cell assembly, as well as an ambient room with battery cyclers, a glove box, and other support equipment.

The standard-size pouch cell at the Testbeds is approximately 83 mm wide x 122 mm long and up to 6 mm thick, with a maximum cell capacity of 10 amp-hours.