The fabrication of battery electrodes and their assembly into cells involves over 100 variables to be decided upon. These range from slurry solids content and materials ratios to coating speeds, electrode loading and N/P ratio of the finished cells. Many of these variables are interdependent, creating a large and complex parameter space, especially when new materials or additives are introduced or modified.
CPI combines automation robots with design of experiments to enable high-throughput screening of these process changes at a small scale. This approach accelerates down-selection of recipes and the exploration of a wide parameter space for optimised performance.
The slurry fabrication robot can produce up to 20 unique slurries a day, dispensing powders and liquids as required with “self-improving” dispensing accuracy. This delivers highly repeatable and reliable results. The coating robot takes these slurries, deposits them onto conductive foils and performs a heating step to evaporate the solvent and solidify the film. It is capable of handling both anode and cathode materials. Used in combination, these robots substantially reduce required human interaction time and can even operate unattended overnight. This enables very large parameter spaces to be explored while minimising human exposure to the dangerous chemicals involved and reducing manual experimentation time.
In BatCAT these robots are used to optimise LFP and NMC Li-ion active materials formulations and explore NMO for Na-ion applications. Battery cells are assembled with the option of a coin cell building robot, further automating the process. The consortium uses this data to build digital models and improve the iteration, reducing time for development cycles.