11/19/2025 Jenny Applequist
In a unique partnership with Nissan, Paul V. Braun’s research group is hosting a long-term visiting researcher from Nissan, Yasunori Abe. Together the team will study ways to improve electric vehicles’ batteries’ electrode materials so that vehicles can travel significantly longer distances per charge.
Written by Jenny Applequist
A Nissan researcher will work on the U of I campus for the duration of the project.
Today’s mainstream electric cars (EVs) can travel about 300 miles on a single charge. That’s a big advance over the 150-mile EV ranges of a just few years ago, but it still falls far short of the range that conventional cars can achieve on a tank of gas. Substantial improvements in battery technology are needed if EVs are to rival the ranges of gas-powered cars.
Now, Paul V. Braun is pursuing a project with Nissan to design materials with the properties needed to improve EV battery electrodes – and the effort has a special feature. Nissan didn’t only provide funding support, but has sent one of their engineers, Yasunori Abe, to collaborate with Braun’s group. Abe has come from Japan to work in residence on the U of I campus for the duration of the project.
“The best way to make [this kind of] advances is by working closely with the companies and organizations for whom these advances are critical,” said Braun, who is a professor and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering in materials science and engineering and the director of the Materials Research Laboratory. “Companies often recognize the most important problems and challenges and have perspectives that we at the university don’t always have. And so when Nissan reached out... with an interest in developing advanced materials for electrochemical energy storage, I was particularly interested because of the opportunity to get their perspective.”
Braun explained that the structure of current batteries’ electrodes is a largely random arrangement of particles that doesn’t provide good pathways for electrons and ions. Many ideas on how to improve that structure have been suggested, but it has been a major challenge to scale any proposed approaches up to the size of a real-world EV battery, which contains hundreds of pounds of material.
Abe said, “We are very interested in developing scalable and high-performance batteries, and we believe that optimized structural design is one of the best strategies to achieve this. So we will conduct research to identify the most suitable structure for next-generation batteries and to understand how we can realize such [a] structure considering scalability.”
Braun stressed how rare and valuable this kind of close international collaboration is, not just for the success of the research, but for the participating students. “The opportunity to have Yasunori visiting from Japan enables much more than just research... My group learns from him both in general about Japan, and specifically about how research is done in Japan,” Braun said. “International exchanges such as this are one thing that makes universities special and unique!”
“The University of Illinois has a long history of having international scholars that have made important contributions,” Braun noted.
Braun said that the team hopes its results will achieve an improvement in the range of 25% to 50% more energy for the same size of EV battery. On the one hand, that might translate into a typical EV range of around 400 miles. Or, for the benefit of cost-sensitive consumers, it might translate into batteries that offer today’s EV ranges but cost much less than today’s EV batteries.
Abe added that Nissan is keen on collaborating with organizations internationally on battery research and development. “We highly value Professor Braun’s group's expertise in 3D structural batteries, and we are very pleased to have the opportunity to collaborate with them,” he said. “We believe that through this partnership, we can develop innovative and advanced technology for next-generation batteries.”
Grainger Engineering Affiliations:
Paul V. Braun is a professor and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering in Materials Science and Engineering, as well as the director of the Materials Research Laboratory. He also has affiliations with the Department of Mechanical Science & Engineering, the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science & Technology.