Faraday Institution - UKBIC collaborations facilitating scale up of battery manufacturing and recycling methods
To compete in the global electrification race, the UK must foster innovative collaborations. The £610 million Faraday Battery Challenge, part of the UKRI Challenge Fund investment, is delivering a mission-led, research and innovation programme that covers “Lab to Factory” development, research, and national scale-up infrastructure.
This case study – the second in a series – highlights the collaboration between two parts of the Faraday Battery Challenge – the Faraday Institution and the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC). The partnership is advancing application-inspired research towards commercialisation, yielding substantial benefits for both organisations, facilitating the exchange of ideas, providing training and career opportunities and delivering value to UKBIC customers. As one example, the collaboration is improving manufacturing yields through the identification of imperfections in the electrode coating process.
| By the numbers | |
|---|---|
| 3 | recycling routes facilitated via providing a reliable supply of production scrap |
| 17,000 | downloads for the joint roadmap paper on Li-ion battery manufacturing research |
Aerial view of the UKBIC.
Identifying imperfections in electrode coating improves manufacturing yield
Battery electrodes are manufactured by spreading a slurry – a semi-liquid mixture of powders and a solvent – onto a foil current collector. During the coating of electrode slurries on the current collectors, a gauge is used for in-line monitoring of the coating weight. Gaps are left in the coating to allow for tags to be welded later in the manufacturing process. In 2021, systems at UKBIC incorrectly identified these coating gaps as imperfections in the coat-weight data.
Slot die continuous coating with streak defect.
As part of the Nextrode project, researchers at WMG helped UKBIC quantify and visualise the quality of electrode coatings made at the facility. The team, led by Professor James Marco, identified a method to process gauge data to quantify the true average coating weight and tolerances without being influenced by these coating gaps. The method had to differentiate between coating gaps and true imperfections in the coatings like streaks, holes, or sloped edges, which have a detrimental impact on battery performance and quality.
This helped UKBIC accurately measure process capability and yield, two key metrics for electrode scale-up and industrialisation. The collaboration helped the team define the required data management protocol. This success encouraged UKBIC to adopt this and other digital tools to improve quality and yield in electrode manufacture.
Professor Nigel Brandon, Imperial College London and Faraday Institution Expert Panel member for the Nextrode project, outlines the value of the relationship:
The work with UKBIC is a very impressive demonstration of the capability being developed. The collaboration clearly both accelerates prototyping and is an excellent validation of the tools being developed from the science.”
Digitisation mitigates risks and costs of scale up of technologies
UKBIC is implementing a new digital platform, which will provide UKBIC’s clients with seamless access to comprehensive campaign data, from process to performance, enhancing their understanding of their technologies. The implementation has the support of WMG (whose involvement is led by Professor James Marco) and the Manufacturing Technology Centre. Once complete, it will integrate new laboratory capabilities and quality procedures into UKBIC’s services, elevating compliance and certification standards. Finally, it will offer advanced modelling and simulation capabilities, ensuring that UKBIC’s clients’ technologies have the best possible chance for success and helping to mitigate the risks and costs associated with their scale up.
Modelling the calendering process to improve production yield
Calendering is a crucial production step in the manufacture of electrodes. The current collector that is coated with an electrode layer containing the active materials is passed between two rollers to compact it. This process affects the porosity, adhesion, thickness, and charge transport properties of the electrodes. Under certain conditions, detrimental defects can be introduced during calendaring such as corrugation (a rippling effect) or embossing (where areas of the electrode’s surface are raised or recessed). Using such electrodes in manufactured cells would have a detrimental impact on battery performance. Therefore, if such defects are present, material would often have to be scrapped, at considerable expense.
Diagram of the calendering process. Courtesy of UKBIC.
The UKBIC team has an ongoing collaboration with Professor Giles Richardson at the University of Southampton (a co-investigator on the Nextrode project) on the modelling of the calendering process. A joint paper has been published that explains the causes of the corrugation during processing under certain conditions, which has identified routes to prevent the effect.
This collaboration is all about building capability within the technical team and helping us build mental models for what is happening on the line. It’s enabled us to take a segue into finite element modelling and the collaboration has been a precursor to more advanced simulations.”
Ameir Mahgoub, Head of Product Engineering at UKBIC
The teams plan to extend the collaboration to investigate the causes of embossing.
UKBIC operators operating the cathode calendering process.
Joint papers
The 2022 paper Roadmap on Li-ion battery manufacturing research, published in the Journal of Physical Energy, provided a baseline for the Nextrode project. Its writing was a multi-organisation collaboration across 40 authors and 14 organisations, including four authors from UKBIC. Since publication it has been downloaded 17,000 times.
Materials supply facilitates scale up of new recycling processes
Establishing a battery recycling industry will enhance the security of the supply chain for the raw materials needed for EV battery production, while also ensuring the sustainable treatment and management of used materials. The Faraday Institution’s ReLiB project on battery recycling and reuse is aiming to establish a technology pipeline of low cost, high throughput, and low environmental impact lithium-ion battery recycling routes. Routes under development include the ultrasonic delamination of electrodes, a green method for binder recovery from electrodes (see page 43 of the 2022/23 annual report) and mild acid/alkali delamination.
Such direct recycling routes aim to recover the functional cathode material, potentially allowing it to be reused in future electrode manufacture. In contrast, current commercial recycling routes recover metal ores or metal salts. Direct recycling, if commercialised, would have numerous benefits such as retention of economic value, lower environmental impact, and the need for fewer downstream processing steps. Ideally, direct recycling could be integrated into a battery manufacturing facility, enabling the recovery of active material from production scrap or defective cells and reusing it in battery manufacture on the same site. See Insight 20 for a discussion of battery recycling routes. ReLiB project’s novel recycling processes show promise at lab scale. Professor Peter Slater, University of Birmingham and member of the ReLiB project, explains how UKBIC is an extremely useful source of materials supply for a number of the Faraday Institution projects, which is facilitating research at larger scales.
One of the challenges of the ReLiB project is getting a reliable supply of electrodes and cells of known material composition in sufficient volume for researchers to use as they scale and compare a number of recycling processes. UKBIC has given us access to production scrap from their mark 2 cells. This has allowed a like-for-like, quantitative comparison of electrode material delamination and associated recycling routes being investigated by ReLiB at Birmingham and Leicester. It allows researchers to assess the reproducibility of their processes and to gain experience of working at larger scale.”
As such, use of UKBIC production scrap by ReLiB project researchers is accelerating the scale up of direct recycling methods – a step towards future UK gigafactories directly recycling their production scrap.
Cathode coating at UKBIC.
About the Faraday Institution, UKBIC and the Faraday Battery Challenge
The Faraday Institution is the UK’s independent institute for electrochemical energy storage research, skills development, market analysis, and early-stage commercialisation. Its research community spans 500+ researchers from 27 UK universities working on 10 application-inspired multi-disciplinary, multi-university research projects.
UKBIC is the UK’s national manufacturing battery development facility, providing manufacturing scale-up and skills for the battery sector. The facility is where businesses come to develop their battery manufacturing processes at the scale they need to move to industrial production. Those working in the industry can develop new skills by learning from specialist teams running the production line.
Created with an initial investment of £130m, an additional £74m from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is being used to enhance and expand the facility by installing a new Flexible Pilot Line to bridge the gap between UKBIC’s larger scale production line and small-scale demonstrator lines available elsewhere. It is also building a new Battery Development Laboratory, a Clean and Dry Zone, and a Cell Characterisation area.
The Faraday Institution and UKBIC are both key delivery partners for the Faraday Battery Challenge, delivered by Innovate UK for UK Research and Innovation. It is building a science superpower for batteries, supporting the UK’s world-class battery facilities along with growing and innovating businesses that are developing the battery supply chain for our future prosperity. The challenge combines research and capability development at the Faraday Institution, business-led innovation through Innovate UK, and manufacturing scale-up and skills development at the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre.
Case study published November 2024.