The global push for electric vehicles hinges on a critical component: the battery. Yet, traditional manufacturing methods are notoriously expensive and energy-intensive. Anaphite is pioneering a solution to decarbonize battery production and make EVs more accessible. Their innovative Dry Coating Precursor (DCP®) technology is designed to accelerate the industry’s shift away from conventional methods, promising a future of cheaper, more sustainable batteries.
To pull back the curtain on this transformative technology, The EV Report connected with Dr. Jennifer Channell, Commercial and Partnerships Lead at Anaphite. In the following discussion, Dr. Channell breaks down how the company is paving the way for the next generation of battery manufacturing.
Who is Anaphite and what is your mission?
Anaphite is a Bristol-based startup making electric vehicle (EV) batteries cheaper and less energy-intensive to manufacture. Our mission is to decarbonise battery production by accelerating the industry’s shift to dry battery electrode coating – a process that is cheaper and generates fewer carbon emissions. Our Dry Coating Precursor (DCP®) technology platform optimises the process, enabling better, more sustainable batteries at lower cost.
What is dry coating?
Dry coating is a more efficient way to make battery electrodes. In simple terms, it’s about coating a dry powder onto a current collector foil instead of using a wet slurry.
In traditional battery manufacturing, electrode materials (active materials for either donating (cathode) or storing (anode) lithium ions, conductive carbon additives, and polymeric binders) are mixed in solvent, to create a slurry. This slurry is coated onto metal foil called a current collector and then must pass through very long drying ovens to remove the solvent. This drying process is incredibly energy-intensive, expensive, and takes up a lot of space. Dry coating eliminates these (often toxic) solvents and the massive drying ovens, reducing the energy required for the electrode production process by 80-90%.
To dry coat successfully, you need a well-mixed, well-structured powder that flows well enough to be fed into the production equipment and which is also able to stick together to make the electrode coating. It is very difficult to achieve this through mechanical mixing of the component materials. This dry mixing requires much time and energy. The result is usually inhomogeneous mixing, poor particle control and limits the formulations that can be used due to safety concerns with mixing nanoparticles like carbon nanotubes, which can be used in wet coating. This gives an inferior electrode compared to what is currently possible with wet coating.
The Anaphite technology platform uses chemistry to create a composite powder that is designed for dry coating and to produce electrodes to the customers’ requirements. The technology platform works with a wide range of materials, including many materials that cannot be safely or satisfactorily used in dry mixing.
This process fits into the electrode manufacturing stage of battery production – the step to make the electrodes before they are assembled into battery cells. By changing this one manufacturing step, we can reduce energy usage by up to 30%, lower production costs by up to 40%, and decrease required manufacturing space by up to 15%.
What is the benefit of dry coating to OEMs?
With both the anode and cathode dry coated, you can save approximately 2% of the total cost of a battery-electric car. That might not sound like much, but in automotive manufacturing, where even fractions of penny on the cost of a single component are important, those margins are enormous!
For perspective, 5-15% of the cell cost currently comes from converting the wet coating into a dry electrode. When you’re talking about mass production of millions of vehicles, these savings become genuinely transformative.
How committed is the automotive industry to dry coating?
The automotive industry has demonstrated strong commitment to dry coating technology. Tesla acquired Maxwell Technologies in 2018 for their dry coating IP and then announced their plans at their September 2020 Battery Day.
More recently, in June 2023, Volkswagen announced their plans to industrialise dry coating via their wholly owned subsidiary, PowerCo. VW’s target is to have dry coating in production from 2027. As Volkswagen stated in 2023, “[Dry coating] has the potential of saving about 30% of energy as well as 15% of floor space required and will therefore save hundreds of millions of Euros each year.”
We’re also seeing commitments from some of the large established cell manufacturers supplying the automotive industry such as LGES who are targeting 2028 for bringing dry coating to market. And Samsung SDI announced last year that they are building a dry-coating pilot line.
Why is dry coating not yet widely adopted?
Dry coating is the future, but there are significant barriers to industrialising the technology. There are two steps to making a dry electrode. The first is making a well-mixed dry powder and the second is evenly coating this onto the foil. But dry mixing and coating powders to make dry electrodes is hard!
The problems with dry mixing include poor mixing, poor particle structure control, limitations on the formulations that can be dry coated, and greater equipment wear, resulting in a poorly performing electrode and greater capital expenditure. These challenges have prevented the widespread adoption of dry coating at industrial scales, despite its clear advantages over wet coating.
What specific benefits does your technology platform deliver?
Our technology platform delivers on four key areas:
- Scalability: We use established chemical engineering approaches that are already proven at scale and enable a greater level of control.
- Flexibility: We provide access to a new additive, active material, and binder landscape for performance, cost and sustainability improvements.
- Cost & Yield: Our energy and production cost is comparable with state-of-the-art dry mixing. We also reduce equipment wear from material-induced abrasion, which in turn reduces capital expenditure costs.
- Control: We enable particle engineering to optimise powder rheology for dry coating.
What challenges did you face when setting up your dry coating process?
The greatest challenge is understanding the properties we need to build into our DCP® powders to be able to produce high quality electrodes at high yield and high speed. This requires skills in electrode formulation, testing and production.
For the coating process itself, the properties of the powder are critically important. The properties need to be optimised for flowability of the powder in the dry coating process to get better yield, but you’re limited if you use standard dry mixing.
Our approach overcomes these limitations by allowing different additives, binders and active materials to be used and engineering the particles of the powder to optimise the properties for dry coating. The industry has seen big changes in cell format and chemistries, and our flexible technology can adapt to these changes.
Is the Industry ripe for change?
Yes. We’re not trying to create demand for dry coating – the demand is already there. There is enormous pressure to reduce the cost and energy-consumption involved in cell manufacture. The EU battery regulation is helping to drive this. Dry coating can significantly reduce the energy intensity of battery manufacturing so it’s an important part of the technology roadmap for many companies. We’re enabling them to move forward.
Proper dry coating means developing something as good as or better than wet coating. Wet coating has been optimised over decades, while dry coating is under-developed in comparison. If you want to invest in a cheaper and greener future, you should make the best platform to build batteries on.
This technology is also strategically important for Western OEMs to access cheaper, more sustainable and locally produced batteries because of the cost reduction dry coating enables. If we want green technology adoption, we need to reduce what’s called the “green premium” – the additional cost that makes environmentally friendly options more expensive than their conventional counterparts.
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