With climate change being one of the biggest challenges facing the world today, Europe has committed to achieving a climate-neutral society by 2050. To accomplish this, improving the sustainability of battery production is essential. However, the current process for manufacturing electrodes for Li-ion batteries (LIBs) is energy consuming and complex.

The traditional process involves mixing the electrode materials, binders and conductive additives with solvents into a wet slurry, which is then coated onto a current collector and dried through an energy consuming process. For the cathode, this process often uses a solvent that raises health, safety and environmental concerns. Additionally, the wet slurry casting process poses limitations for producing thicker electrodes, which in turn restricts efforts to increasing energy density and lowering the manufacturing cost.

To address these challenges, the project ULTRADRY, which stands for “Unlocking the potential of sustainable and solvent-free fabrication of electrodes for Li-ion battery cells”, proposes dry processing to manufacture more sustainable batteries. Dry processing has the potential to reduce energy consumption and costs, avoid the use of harmful solvents, and enable the production of thicker electrodes with higher areal capacity, thus overcoming the current challenges. However, the development of fundamental knowledge about this process is essential to fully achieve its potential. ULTRADRY aims to bridge some of the most critical knowledge gaps in this field to unlock the benefits of dry processing for LIB electrodes. Additionally, the project seeks to lay the foundation for identifying and developing new binders with less fluorine-content and a larger electrochemical stability range.

Starting this December, with a budget of over 82K€ and with a duration of 3 years, ULTRADRY brings together the expertise of different European entities such as SINTEF, a multidisciplinary research organization; the Laboratory of Energy Storage and Conversion of Warsaw University of Technology (WUT); and the Energy Technologies LCA and Sustainability Group of the Energy System Analytics (ESA) Department from IREC led by Victor Ferreira.

The role of IREC

IREC is responsible for the techno-economic analysis (TEA) and the life cycle assessment (LCA) of ULTRADRY’s process, as well as guiding and helping the consortium in the measurement of the environmental impact of the processes, materials, and design choices.

Acknowledgements (in Spanish)

El contrato es parte de la actuación PCI2024-153507, financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, la Agencia y, en su caso, la Unión Europea (Proyecto PCI2024-153507 financiado por MCIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033 / UE)