Scalable dry electrode process is essential for the sustainable manufacturing of the lithium based batteries. Here, the authors propose a dry press-coating technique to fabricate a robust and flexible high loading electrode for lithium pouch cells.
This work is intended to develop new perspectives on the application of advanced techniques to enable a more predictive approach to identify optimum lithium-ion battery manufacturing conditions, with a focus upon the critical drying process. The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Although the aqueous-based cathode slurry is easy to be transferred to the current coating technology without extra cost, the sacrifice of capacity and cycle stability is not acceptable for battery production. Solvent-free manufacturing emerges as an effective method to skip the drying process and avoid the organic solvent.
In most methods for manufacturing battery electrodes, the dry mixing of materials is a distinct step that often needs help to achieve uniformity, particularly on a large scale. This lack of homogeneity can result in variable battery performance.
Our review paper comprehensively examines the dry battery electrode technology used in LIBs, which implies the use of no solvents to produce dry electrodes or coatings. In contrast, the conventional wet electrode technique includes processes for solvent recovery/drying and the mixing of solvents like N-methyl pyrrolidine (NMP).
The dry-film-production approach streamlines the manufacturing of LIBs by eliminating the traditional solvent mixing, coating, drying, and solvent recovery steps. This reduction in process complexity also results in significant energy and equipment expense savings. As a result, this has greatly improved the efficiency of battery production.