BERLIN: Scientists in Germany have come up with a faster way to make the electrodes used in batteries for electric cars, a discovery that will likely mean more zero-emission vehicles will able to make it to the roads more quickly.
The new electrode-coating process enables record production speeds and also reduces waste, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe say.
This should help bring down the coat of batteries and boost electromobility by making electric cars cheaper to produce.
On a typical production line, electrodes using the new process can be produced for three times as many battery cells. The electrodes in lithium-ion batteries are coated with metal and they act as current collectors, conducting the electric current in and out of the cell.
At present coating the electrodes means applying electrode material in the form of a thin paste to a copper or aluminium foil in a rectangular pattern.
The drawback is that the coating process has to be interrupted and restarted repeatedly and producing the sharp edges without smearing the material is hard to achieve at high production speeds.
Using a special nozzle developed at KIT, the electrode coating is carried out much faster and the material dries more quickly.
"Precision of electrode coating is an essential factor for efficiency and costs of battery cell production," said Professor Wilhelm Schabel from the Institute of Thermal Process Engineering – Thin Film Technology (TVT-TFT), who is responsible for research into this topic at KIT.
“Even smallest production errors make battery cells unusable. Due to the high reject rate and the low throughput, lithium-ion batteries today are more expensive than actually necessary," said Schabel.
