NEXTRODE PROJECT
There’s good news and there’s bad
news. “The current processes for
lithium-ion battery production
have been very heavily optimized,
but very empirically. So there
isn’t really a deep understanding of what’s
happening in some of the critical stages of
the battery manufacturing process,” says
Professor David Greenwood from WMG,
University of Warwick.
This is a problem facing one of the fastestgrowing
industries on the planet, but luckily
Greenwood and his team have just secured
funding from a £55m (US$72m) Faraday
Institution grant, which has enlisted fi ve
UK-based consortia to conduct applicationinspired
research over the next four years to
better understand lithium-ion battery systems
and manufacturing processes.
Demand for energy-dense lithium-ion
battery units has sky-rocketed since a global
drive to reduce CO2 emissions dramatically
increased production of electric vehicles,
but Greenwood feels that critical processes,
particularly where manufacturers take the
electrochemical materials and mix them to
form a slurry, has huge scope for improvement.
“Without wanting to simplify it too much,
the current process is a bit like throwing
ingredients in a food blender, but mixing
it to 500 or 1,000-liter batches. As a result,
the formulation of materials that goes into
those mixes has been developed via many
experiments and a large amount of trial and
error,” he says. “We don’t yet have predictive
tools that would allow manufacturers to
create an electrode with a specifi c energy
density, power density and mass loading.”
1. WMG is set up for
collaboration between
academia and the public
and private sectors to
drive innovation in
science, technology
and engineering
1
116 // January 2020 // www.electrichybridvehicletechnology.com
/www.electrichybridvehicletechnology.com