UCSD - University of California - San Diego

04/21/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/21/2026 10:02

Probing New Sodium Battery Materials with SDSC’s Expanse Supercomputer

Published Date

April 21, 2026

Article Content

Key Takeaways

  • Researchers designed a new sodium-based battery cathode that stores more energy and lasts longer than earlier versions.
  • High-performance computing-guided materials design can speed up development of affordable, grid-scale batteries that rely on abundant sodium instead of scarce lithium.

The Expanse supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences has played an important role in helping researchers design the next generation of batteries that could make large-scale energy storage cheaper and more sustainable. Today's grid and electric vehicles rely heavily on lithium-ion batteries, but lithium is relatively expensive and unevenly distributed globally. Sodium, by contrast, is abundant and inexpensive - the same element found in table salt - which makes sodium-based batteries an appealing option for big battery installations that back up solar and wind power. The challenge has been getting sodium batteries to deliver enough power while also lasting for many charge-discharge cycles.

In this new study, scientists from UC San Diego worked with international colleagues to better understand the battery's positive electrode, known as the cathode. They started from an existing sodium-based material and experimented with adding very small amounts of lithium and titanium, like adjusting the seasoning in a recipe.

"These subtle changes turned out to matter a lot: the modified material could store more energy and remained stable even when the battery was pushed to higher voltages, a key requirement for getting more energy out of each charge," explained Professor Shirley Meng, who is the faculty director for the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering and a professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. "In lab tests, the improved cathode held significantly more charge and kept most of its capacity after many cycles, even under demanding high-voltage conditions that usually cause sodium materials to break down more quickly."

X-ray map showing how sodium, nickel, manganese, titanium and oxygen are spread throughout the new battery material proposed in the UC San Diego study that utilized SDSC's Expanse. Credit: Advanced Energy Materials

To understand why such tiny tweaks made such a big difference, Shyue Ping Ong, also an adjunct professor in the chemical and nano engineering department at UC San Diego and a collaborator on the project, turned to SDSC's Expanse. Using U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS allocations on Expanse, Ong's team ran large-scale simulations of how sodium ions move through the material's crystal structure and how that structure responds as the battery charges and discharges using AI models known as foundation potentials.

Foundation potentials are a recent innovation pioneered by Ong's group that enable atomistic simulations at a fraction of the cost of expensive calculations. Ong said that the simulations helped explain why the lithium- and titanium-enhanced material allowed sodium to travel more freely and prevented the crystal framework from collapsing during operation.

"By narrowing down promising designs on Expanse before heading into the lab, we were able to move much faster than if we had relied on trial and error alone," Ong said. "Our results point to a practical pathway for improving sodium-ion batteries, making it more feasible to build large battery farms that store renewable energy and release it when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing."

Ong said that this study also highlights a broader shift in energy research: supercomputers like Expanse, combined with AI models such as foundation potentials, are becoming essential tools for discovering and refining new materials, turning complex atomic-scale physics into actionable design rules that can accelerate the transition to a cleaner, more resilient power grid.

The work on Expanse was supported by NSF ACCESS (allocation no. DMR150014).

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