The new lab will provide that missing piece in the engineering infrastructure.

The facility will have a dry room and equipment for creating electrode slurries, coating electrodes, and layering the battery components. The batteries will be fabricated in plastic-lined aluminum pouches that bear a resemblance to a Pop Tart package.

While useful for experiments, the pouch cell batteries also have commercial applications in electric vehicles and consumer electronics. Schwartz said there’s growing demand for the pouch cell batteries from heavy trucking and aviation.