Big Ideas Lab podcast takes on the science of scale-up

Rechargeable lithium batteries trace back to 1972, but they wouldn’t reach consumer products until 1991. Solar photovoltaic cells existed in the 1950s, long before solar panels appeared on rooftops. And the MRI was demonstrated in the 1970s, years before the machines became hospital staples.

In each case, the core scientific principles had been proven. The difficult part was scaling them into technologies people could reliably use.

The average disruptive technology takes roughly 35 years to cross that divide. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists are trying to compress that timeline. Learn how in the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab podcast, available on Apple and Spotify.

In the time a breakthrough remains stuck between proven and available, someone else can reach the market first. Supply chains can form around foreign manufacturing. Costs remain high, and the public misses out on the technology’s benefits.

In 2022, LLNL launched a multiyear effort called the science of scale-up. Its goal was to understand why promising technologies stall — and what scientists could do earlier to keep them moving.

“Oftentimes we think about building a bigger battery. Well, turns out, say for your phone, you don't actually want a bigger battery. You might not even want a more powerful battery. But you do want something that's going to last longer. You don't want to charge it every couple hours. You want it to last for most of a day,” said LLNL scientist Andrew Wong. “But let's say that you have a car that has a battery. You might care a lot more about being able to put your foot down on the pedal and get that energy out of it.

“Those kinds of things are different dimensions of scale-up, of how you actually make [a technology] work for a user in its application. Those are the kinds of things we think about.”

Scale can mean producing more, lasting longer, delivering power faster, reducing costs or changing how something is manufactured. To accomplish that, researchers at LLNL build, test, model and refine designs in a cycle.

Each cycle brings these technologies closer to leaving the laboratory — where they can support new manufacturing pathways and begin improving lives and processes.

“One thing that's unique about the way we work on this problem here is that we have the same people working on the basic science questions as the scale-up,” said LLNL scientist Sarah Baker. “So they can take that thinking and cycle it back to the basic science questions and back up and back down, and that's very, very rare.”

Scaling well is rarely one enormous leap from discovery to deployment. Instead, it’s a series of better-informed steps—- and every solved problem shortens the distance between a promising idea and a technology the public can actually use.

Learn more about the science of scale-up in the latest episode of the Big Ideas Lab, available on Apple and Spotify.