BCMaterials to Develop Five New ‘Generación de Conocimiento’ Projects

BCMaterials will lead or participate in five new projects funded under the Spanish Ministry of Science, Universities and Innovation ‘Generación de Conocimiento’ (‘Knowledge Generation’) call. The projects will support fundamental research in fields ranging from energy storage and healthcare to environmental sustainability and the circular economy.

Safer Energy Storage

The BISMART project — Making Electric-Vehicle Batteries Safer by Design — aims to lay the groundwork for a new generation of safer, higher-performance lithium-ion batteries.

BISMART will develop a protective layer based on porous, highly tunable materials to prevent the formation of dendrites: metallic filaments that can grow inside lithium-ion batteries and cause short circuits. The project will also introduce self-healing properties and automatic shutdown mechanisms designed to reduce the risk of overheating.

Ikerbasque researchers Qi Zhang and Manuel Salado will lead the project.

Bioenergy and Biotechnology

The BIOMMA project — Wiring Bacteria to Turn Sunlight into Useful Chemicals — will explore how bacteria can be used to convert light into valuable chemical compounds, including substances that could be used in fertilisers.

Coordinated by Santiago Rodríguez, Ramón y Cajal and Ikerbasque Fellow at BCMaterials, the project will study Shewanella oneidensis, a bacterium capable of exchanging electrons with electrodes and converting carbon dioxide and other carbon sources into compounds of interest.

More Sustainable Refrigeration

Conventional refrigeration systems consume large amounts of energy and are associated with significant greenhouse gas emissions. The MAGCOOLEST project — Refrigeration Without Gases or Compressors — will explore an alternative based on magnetocaloric materials.

These materials heat up or cool down when exposed to a magnetic field, opening the door to quieter, more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly solid-state refrigeration technologies.

BCMaterials will carry out the project in collaboration with the University of Oviedo and the University of the Basque Country (EHU). José María Porro and Daniel Salazar will coordinate BCMaterials’ contribution.

Cardiovascular Health

The PATHOS project — A Heart on a Chip to Understand Deadly Arrhythmias — will use heart-on-a-chip devices to investigate cardiac muscle cells carrying mutations associated with channelopathies, disorders that can lead to potentially life-threatening arrhythmias.

The project will examine how factors such as lipid levels, acidity and heart rate affect arrhythmia risk, while machine-learning models will be used to analyse the results.

BCMaterials will develop PATHOS in collaboration with the University of Valencia. The project will be coordinated by Ikerbasque researchers Senentxu Lanceros-Méndez and Unai Silván.

Marine Technology and the Circular Economy

The growing use of autonomous sensors in aquaculture and ocean monitoring also raises an environmental challenge: once these devices stop working or are discarded, their batteries may release pollutants into the water.

To address this issue, BCMaterials has joined forces with the University of the Basque Country (EHU), Gaiker and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to develop batteries and energy-storage systems based on marine-derived materials.

The URDIN project — Batteries That Dissolve Safely Back into the Sea — will explore the use of sodium obtained from brines, together with electrodes and biopolymers derived from algae. The aim is to develop energy-storage devices designed to dissolve safely in water at the end of their useful life.

Juan Pablo Esquivel, Ikerbasque Associate Professor at BCMaterials, will coordinate the project.