LLNL aims to learn faster with science of scale-up

The science of scale-up enables a faster and more reliable advancement of technology from research and development through commercial deployment. Using techniques like computer modeling and advanced manufacturing, teams can compress the technology scale-up timeline, which can include making something bigger, more numerous, faster or more repeatably.

Accelerating scale-up is particularly crucial for developing hard tech products, including those aimed at imminent national and global needs. Historically, it takes about 35 years for a disruptive technology to go from proof-of-concept to commercialization, and projects and companies often run into dead ends after spending time and resources solving the wrong problems. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and its collaborators aim to change that.

Last fall, LLNL hosted a science of scale-up workshop with academic groups, representatives from national laboratories, startup companies, large company partners and Department of Energy program managers. Now, the collective has published a report of their most important findings.

The purpose of the workshop was to identify the needs of and collect insights from organizations across the research, development, demonstration and deployment (RDD&D) pipeline.

“With these perspectives, we were able to identify key barriers to scaling up technologies across the RDD&D chain,” said the report’s lead author and LLNL scientist Drew Wong.

Using LLNL’s large language model to synthesize 20 hours’ worth of transcripts, the team identified seven key themes from the workshop: access to prototype and demonstration facilities, workforce education and training, open-access software, infrastructure ecosystem integration, funding, testing standards for performance and durability, and knowledge transfer and information sharing.

“All the themes can roughly boil down to one key takeaway: we need to learn faster,” said Wong.

As a specific example, the workshop dove into the details of electrolysis technologies, which require complex physics, manufacturing and integration.

“In the workshop, we found we could move much more quickly if our research was a part of an ecosystem that allowed us to learn faster through prototyping, had knowledgeable people to help build things and could tap into industry expertise,” said Wong. “Livermore is well situated to foster that kind of ecosystem, where technologies across the lab, such as electrolyzers, can be accelerated toward deployment.”

A number of budding new collaborations and conversations about the resources and support required for scale-up have sprung up from the workshop. With the publication of the report, the LLNL team hopes that organizations can begin developing strategic plans for reducing barriers at the institutional level.

The workshop was enabled by the Department of Energy’s Industrial Efficiency and Decarbonization Office. LLNL’s Program Development Support Office prepared the report figures, design and editing for publication.