Dispersing powders in lithium-ion battery slurries at millisecond intervals

The strong increase in sales of elec­tric vehi­cles and an unprece­dent­ed surge in demand for lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies require bat­tery pro­duc­tion designed for high capac­i­ties. ystral presents the Batt-TDS™, a new series of pow­der dis­per­sion sys­tems for the devel­op­ment and indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion of elec­trode slur­ries for lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies. The Batt-TDS webi­nar pro­vides infor­ma­tion about the sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced process times, clean pro­duc­tion and high­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty — even for small batches.

A new webi­nar pro­vides infor­ma­tion about the new process with Batt-TDS, which can offer bat­tery man­u­fac­tur­ers a solu­tion that excels in its high-speed process. The Batt-TDS has the flex­i­bil­i­ty to process dif­fer­ent mate­ri­als by com­bin­ing the func­tions of mul­ti­ple machines into a sin­gle core sys­tem. Com­pared to plan­e­tary mix­ers that must mix for hours to achieve dis­per­sion, the Batt-TDS can com­plete the entire process in min­utes, enabling faster R&D cycles for more robust devel­op­ment. Dis­per­sion itself requires only mil­lisec­onds as com­po­nents pass through the inline process cham­ber. At pro­duc­tion scale, this trans­lates to more than 10 times the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of con­ven­tion­al tech­nolo­gies and twice the pro­duc­tiv­i­ty of avail­able extrud­ers. Eas­i­ly scal­able to dif­fer­ent bat­tery chemistries, the Batt-TDS solu­tion is suit­able for pro­duc­tion at cur­rent indus­tri­al lev­els and ready for tomor­row’s gigafactories.

Next generation process technology

The Batt-TDS intro­duces pow­der dust-free into a liq­uid stream under vac­u­um, cre­at­ing the con­di­tions for opti­mal dis­per­sion of var­i­ous com­po­nents in a con­tin­u­ous flow. By inde­pen­dent­ly con­trol­ling each key para­me­ter, the new tech­nol­o­gy offers a wide process win­dow in a sin­gle sys­tem. This can­not be achieved with exist­ing sys­tems such as a high-speed dis­solver, plan­e­tary mix­er or even the more mod­ern extrud­er. The dis­per­sion of poly­mer­ic binders, con­duc­tive car­bons and abra­sive actives is adjust­ed accord­ing to their spe­cif­ic phys­i­cal prop­er­ties and topolo­gies. The unique tech­nol­o­gy is capa­ble of pro­cess­ing high-solids slur­ries with vis­cosi­ties that exceed indus­try require­ments, and the wash-in-place (WIP) fea­ture max­i­mizes machine uptime.

Scalable and cost-efficient

The prod­uct range includes a 12-liter unit for rapid for­mu­la­tion and process screen­ing, and pro­duc­tion sys­tems for through­puts of more than 5000 liters per hour.

“The Batt-TDS is the true ‘Swiss Army knife’ of process tools for bat­tery slur­ries. We can offer man­u­fac­tur­ers world­wide a tech­nol­o­gy that enables them to achieve high prod­uct qual­i­ty in a frac­tion of the time required by con­ven­tion­al processes.”

-David Manke, CTO and CEO

Richard Pot­ter added, “The plat­form offers low cost of own­er­ship and the high­est pro­duc­tiv­i­ty per square foot of fab space.”