Back to top
Scientific institutions in the Republic of Korea (ROK) offer international partners an opportunity to build and trade knowledge in areas of global scientific interest, such as renewable energy, data science, and climate research. Lawrence Livermore’s efforts to engage with ROK scientists has led to a synergistic research relationship with the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). The partnership is living up to its promise, yielding researcher exchanges, joint publications, and collaborative research projects drawing on complementary capabilities. “Mutual engagement is an investment, an effort in advancing science,” says Terry Land, who coordinates the collaboration for the Laboratory. “We are equal partners with KIST. The institution has strong research in areas of mutual interest. We get as much as we give.”
KIST, established in 1966, was the first government-funded science institution in Korea at a time when the nation sought science power for the future. The institution recruited U.S.-educated scientists of Korean descent and, with advisers from the U.S. government, set out to create a concept similar to today’s Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories.
Other parallels exist between Lawrence Livermore and KIST. For example, the Korean institution has a project selection and funding mechanism similar to Lawrence Livermore’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program. Livermore materials scientist Yong Han, who played a key role in establishing the KIST partnership, says, “The science is the core of our partnership, but the history adds to our shared story.” Since its founding, KIST has spawned 16 other government research institutes and has engaged in partnerships with other institutions in Korea as well as research facilities in Israel, Finland, and Japan.
Allies in Science
Laboratory Deputy Director of Science and Technology Pat Falcone championed international engagement well before the KIST partnership began. “Pat envisioned ‘allies in science’ based on her experience working at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy,” says Han. “Her vision was ahead of everyone else’s.” Falcone says, “Scientific diplomacy—having communication channels with our counterparts around the world and cultivating partnerships to tackle global challenges—is critical. We enhance our capabilities by tapping into emerging ideas.”
Inspired by the concept of scientific diplomacy, Han and the Laboratory’s Principal Associate Director for Physical and Life Sciences Glenn Fox sought meetings with ROK research institutions as early as 2014. A contact in Korea recommended KIST since the institution’s range of research complemented Lawrence Livermore’s. “KIST offered an expanded conversation around materials science that could branch out into other areas of science important to both KIST and the Laboratory,” says Fox, recalling initial discussions. Han initiated high-level collaboration with KIST’s management team—considering areas of engagement, needed approvals, funding, and means to store collected data—to pave the way for success.
In 2019, leaders within the Physical and Life Sciences Principal Directorate and members of the hydrogen material research team visited KIST, meeting with KIST’s senior management and researchers. Discussions focused on potential collaboration opportunities and research topics. “We identified several scientific questions to address through collaboration,” says Tae Wook Heo, a Livermore materials scientist who participated in the visit as part of the hydrogen material research team. The first focus area—hydrogen and related fuel cell technologies—was the topic of follow-on meetings in Washington, D.C. At the inaugural joint workshop, hosted at Lawrence Livermore in September 2019, KIST and the Laboratory discussed details such as staff exchanges, joint publications, and internships. KIST and the Laboratory aimed to meet twice yearly for workshops and researcher updates. A seminar series was established to explore research areas of mutual interest for future collaborations.
COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns limited the teams to virtual brainstorming workshops in 2020 and 2021. The partners reconvened at Livermore in August 2022 to sign a Memorandum of Understanding forging a collaborative research partnership in the fields of environmental science, data science, and renewable energy—specifically technologies in hydrogen, solid-state battery, and catalysis for carbon dioxide reduction. Scientists from both institutions shared individual research in each key area, ultimately agreeing to collaborate on five LDRD projects spanning these fields. The Laboratory’s commitment to the partnership was further unified with a ribbon cutting at a dedicated KIST office and research space located at the Livermore Valley Open Campus. “Despite space being at a premium onsite, creating an office for KIST researchers who visit Livermore for months at a time was an important step,” says Fox.
In September 2023, 21 Livermore researchers traveled to South Korea to tour KIST laboratories and facilities and share project updates in a workshop setting. “The benefit of the workshops is in hearing from multiple disciplines with expertise contributing to many different areas,” says Land. “The work goes beyond what a single researcher presents. We see greater potential because we’re looking at the capabilities and expertise of an entire organization. For example, collaborative research in battery technologies has broadened to many topics and expanded its focus beyond solid-state technologies.” Adds Livermore materials scientist Marissa Wood, who collaborates with KIST on battery research, “Both laboratories have a similar applied focus in our battery work, so it’s great to see the synergy between our two perspectives. I look forward to continuing to tackle these challenging battery problems together in the future.”
Growing Commitments
The annual meeting pace continued in August 2024 when KIST researchers returned to the Livermore campus for research updates and breakout sessions exploring expanded collaboration. A new collaborative research field on the effects of variations in water cycles was added to the partnership’s list of collaborative interests. Future research in subsurface reservoir management, water treatment and purification, and advanced materials enabling innovations in water resources will benefit from the combination of Livermore’s atmospheric science research and capabilities found at the KIST Center for Water Cycle Research.
The partners have expanded their funding commitment to staff and research exchanges. To date, the Laboratory has hosted four visiting KIST researchers, and the partnership counts six joint publications across all fields of collaboration. “We’ve published together, we’ve done science together, we have stories to tell,” says Brandon Wood, a Livermore materials scientist involved in the partnership’s earliest hydrogen storage research.
Hydrogen Research Symmetry
Economically viable production, storage, distribution, and utilization are essential for hydrogen to serve effectively as a renewable energy carrier. Lawrence Livermore and KIST both have strong histories in materials science research that can be applied to enable a hydrogen economy. Specifically, Lawrence Livermore has served as a leading institution for multiscale modeling and simulation in DOE research consortia, including the Hydrogen Materials Advanced Research Consortium (HyMARC). The research consortium comprises multiple DOE national laboratories and the National Institute of Standards and Technology working together to advance efficient storage solutions for hydrogen in liquid or solid forms. KIST has leveraged its expertise and strength in materials characterization to identify and isolate the key mechanisms that operate hydrogen storage materials in support of ROK’s Hydrogen Economy Roadmap aiming to supply over 6 million hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to meet domestic transportation demands and export goals by 2050.
At the 2022 Livermore–KIST workshop series, Heo presented potential research collaboration topics focused on low- and high-temperature hydrogen–material interactions for practical applications including hydrogen storage, thermal energy storage, and green steelmaking utilizing hydrogen. This initiative builds on successful collaborative Livermore–KIST research that resulted in a joint publication on the initial hydrogenation of metallic alloys for hydrogen storage—one of the topics addressed by Livermore’s HyMARC team, led by Brandon Wood.
Specifically, Heo and his team have integrated modeling and experimentation to investigate hydrogen-induced phase transformations at temperatures surpassing 700°C, which offer promise for hydride-based thermal energy storage materials and hydrogen-based steelmaking processes. This research, part of an LDRD-funded project, further fosters Livermore–KIST collaboration on this topic. By the 2024 workshop, collaborative work had enhanced the understanding of hydrogen behavior and hydride formation at controlled grain boundaries—unavoidable defects that can affect properties such as mass transport, thermal transport, and mechanical properties—in practical metals. “Our collaboration combines Livermore’s leading simulation capabilities enhanced by machine learning and KIST’s advanced experimental characterizations. This synergy has enabled us to correlate grain boundary characteristics with hydride formation tendencies, addressing a significant knowledge gap,” says Heo. The Livermore–KIST team is preparing a joint publication to report their findings.
More recently, the hydrogen partnership with KIST has been incorporated into a trilateral ROK–Japan–U.S. effort also involving Sandia National Laboratories, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan, among others. The goal of these new partnerships is to understand fundamentals of hydrogen–metal interactions for hydrogen purification, separation, storage, and compression as well as catalyst degradation for hydrogen production.
A Solid Battery Collaboration
As the global need for battery-supplied power for computers, cellular phones, electric vehicles, and grid storage grows, so does interest in designing and manufacturing batteries with higher energy density and improved safety compared to today’s lithium-ion batteries. Livermore materials scientists Marissa Wood and Johanna Schwartz offer different areas of expertise to arrive at this goal. Wood’s work in solid-state batteries seeks to increase the energy density by replacing the conventional graphite anode in lithium-ion batteries with a high-capacity, lithium-metal anode and to improve safety by replacing the flammable liquid electrolyte with a safer solid-state alternative. The challenge lies in maintaining good battery performance over repeated charge/discharge cycles, which requires repeatable, uniform lithium-metal plating and stripping plus a solid electrolyte material with high lithium-ion conductivity. Schwartz specializes in high-throughput screening of polymer materials that could be used for solid-state electrolytes using a 3D-printing platform. Supporting Wood and Schwartz are the Laboratory’s additive manufacturing capabilities that include printing both polymers and battery electrode materials.
KIST shares Livermore’s interest in solid-state batteries and offers capabilities in synthesizing many types of polymer solid electrolytes, including one with self-healing properties. KIST produced novel polymer electrolyte samples for Wood and Schwartz to test at Lawrence Livermore. “Developing electrolytes from new polymer materials with unique properties could help solve some of our solid-state battery performance challenges, such as lithium-ion conductivity and materials delamination. Finding those new materials is where KIST comes in,” says Wood.
A second effort, focused on computational modeling, brought together researchers from both campuses to compute properties of new halide-based solid electrolyte materials for next-generation solid-state batteries. The team, including Lawrence Livermore scientists Kwangnam Kim and Brandon Wood, has worked together to issue multiple joint publications on new battery material formulations, estimating the stability and performance of these materials prior to full laboratory demonstration. Livermore recently hosted a KIST researcher for a sabbatical visit to further pursue this research direction.
At the 2022 joint meeting, Marissa Wood briefed KIST on an approach aimed at improving energy density by combining experimentation and modeling to investigate lithium anode behavior in solid‐state batteries. Schwartz presented her high-throughput screening system, Studying Polymers on a Chip (SPOC), applied to next-generation polymer electrolytes for lithium‐ion batteries. By the 2024 workshops, the partnership had expanded, drawing on KIST’s expertise in materials synthesis and characterization as well as Lawrence Livermore’s efforts in 3D printing, high-throughput screening, and modeling. Both the lithium anode work and the SPOC system were LDRD-funded. Next steps include testing new KIST battery materials at the Laboratory, continued collaboration on modeling new electrolyte materials, and long-term researcher exchanges. Future aims include studies of material degradation mechanisms and sustainable approaches to battery manufacturing, such as leveraging recycled materials and using earth-abundant sodium instead of lithium.
Future Research Directions
Workshops in 2022 and 2024 highlighted growing collaboration in other shared areas of research interest. Lawrence Livermore and KIST have initiated research to improve the economic feasibility and versatility of electrochemical synthesis technologies to produce commodity chemicals. (See “New Pathways to Commodity Chemicals” for another Livermore partnership in this field.) Livermore offers expertise in technologies to convert carbon dioxide to ethylene, a ubiquitous plastic currently derived from fossil fuels. KIST researches the catalysis of bioderived 5-hydroxymethylfurfural into 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid used for bio-based polymers. At both the 2022 and 2024 workshops, researchers from each institution discussed promising outcomes in electrochemical reactor performance.
In addition, a Livermore–KIST collaboration is expanding data science capabilities to support shared materials research in hydrogen storage, solid-state batteries, and catalysis. At recent workshops, Laboratory scientists including Anna Hiszpanski, Huiyun Jeong, and Aditya Prajapati shared an approach to building models by representing research document content in networks and then analyzing the network for patterns and influences (document network analysis). Complementary KIST research has built a knowledge base for catalyst materials from literature using natural language processing.
Finally, workshop presentations in 2022 highlighted Livermore’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility and Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison among other climate science programs. In 2024, the institutions identified collaborative opportunities including research at a proposed ARM mobile facility in the ROK and at a new cloud chamber (for studying cloud process models) at KIST. These efforts would link ARM data with the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, a DOE project led by Laboratory scientists.
Following the successful outcomes and growth of the Livermore–KIST partnership, the Laboratory has gone on to pursue collaborative research with KAIST, specifically to target shared expertise in materials and energy storage technologies. Informal meetings that started in 2018 have culminated in the two organizations signing a Memorandum of Understanding in June 2024. As with the KIST partnership, Lawrence Livermore will apply its expertise in multiscale modeling to complement KAIST’s focus on experimentation.
Additional engagements are underway with other Korean research campuses. Land notes that Korea’s research institutions are well-staffed and well-funded by a government committed to advancing technology and the economy. “Their commitment yields top researchers, not merely professors writing one proposal each year,” she says. Adds Schwartz, “DOE national laboratories are uniquely situated to meet technology challenges, even more so when partnered with industry and institutions such as KIST. Our short- and long-term goals are attainable.”
—S&TR Staff
(with additional reporting by Amy Weldon)
For further information contact Terry Land (925) 423-5836 (land1 [at] llnl.gov (land1[at]llnl[dot]gov)).
