NLR Battery Innovation Awarded NASA’s Invention of the Year

Researchers at the Department of Energy's National Laboratory of the Rockies, working with NASA and battery safety company KULR Technology Group, just won NASA's 2025 Invention of the Year for a device that makes lithium-ion batteries fail on purpose, in a controlled way, so engineers can study how to stop that failure from spreading. The device, called the ISC-D, is a small set of layered metal discs separated by wax that gets planted inside a battery cell. Heating the cell to 57°C melts the wax, letting the metal touch and trigger a short circuit under lab conditions rather than by accident.

This matters because the real danger in battery packs, including the ones in cars and home batteries, is "thermal runaway": one cell overheating and setting off a chain reaction in the whole pack. Until this device existed, researchers could only test battery failure by crushing or puncturing cells from the outside, which does not reproduce the kind of internal defect, like a stray speck of dust, that can start a runaway reaction from within.

The technology, developed over more than a decade and tied to NASA's Artemis moon missions, is now licensed to KULR and used by more than 80 companies, including Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen, to test batteries in vehicles, aircraft, and satellites. For homeowners, the practical link is indirect: better tools for stress-testing battery packs feed into safer designs for the batteries increasingly built into electric vehicles and home battery storage systems.