Abstract
Slurry casting has been used to fabricate lithium-ion battery electrodes for decades, which involves toxic and expensive organic solvents followed by high-cost vacuum drying and electrode calendering. This work presents a new manufacturing method using a nonthermal plasma to create inter- particle binding without using any polymeric binding materials, enabling solvent-free manufacturing electrodes with any electrochemistry of choice. The cold-plasma-coating technique enables fabricating electrodes with thickness (>200 lm), high mass loading (>30 mg cm^-2), high peel strength, and the ability to print lithium-ion batteries in an arbitrary geometry. This crosscutting, chemistry agnostic, platform technology would increase energy density, eliminate the use of solvents, vacuum drying, and calendering processes during production, and reduce manufacturing cost for current and future cell designs. Here, lithium iron phosphate and lithium cobalt oxide were used as examples to demonstrate the efficacy of the cold-plasma- coating technique. It is found that the mechanical peel strength of cold- plasma-coating-manufactured lithium iron phosphate is over an order of magnitude higher than that of slurry-casted lithium iron phosphate electrodes. Full cells assembled with a graphite anode and the cold-plasma- coating-lithium iron phosphate cathode offer highly reversible cycling performance with a capacity retention of 81.6% over 500 cycles. For the highly conductive cathode material lithium cobalt oxide, an areal capacity of 4.2 mAh cm^-2 at 0.2 C is attained. We anticipate that this new, highly scalable manufacturing technique will redefine global lithium-ion battery manufacturing providing significantly reduced plant footprints and material costs.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-2024
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1002/eem2.12503
Funding Information
Authors thank the financial support from Intecells Inc. via an award number AWD_19-08-0127. Z.L. and C.B. acknowledge the support from Paul M. Rady Mechanical Engineering Department at University of Colorado Boulder.
Repository Citation
Liang, Zhiming; Li, Tianyi; Chi, Holden; Ziegelbauer, Joseph; Sun, Kai; Wang, Ming; Zhang, Wei; Liu, Tuo; Cheng, Yang-Tse; Chen, Zonghai; Gayden, Xiaohong; and Ban, Chunmei, "Solvent-Free Manufacturing of Lithium-Ion Battery Electrodes via Cold Plasma" (2024). Chemical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications. 111.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cme_facpub/111
Notes/Citation Information
© 2022 The Authors. Energy & Environmental Materials published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Zhengzhou University. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.