Lithium Ion Battery Electrode Fabrication via Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

In our research, the lithium ion battery electrodes were manufactured using a new powder painting process, which is completely dry. No solvents are applied, which is necessary in the conventional slurry-cast electrode manufacture. Thermal activation time has also been tremendously reduced due to a lowered time and resource requirement when the solvent evaporation process in conventional method is replaced by a hot rolling process. It has been found that inducing the mechanical bonding of the thermoplastic polymer to the remaining active electrode particles only takes a few seconds for the thermal activation step. Furthermore, skipping the traditional drying process allows large-scale Li-ion battery production to be more economically viable in markets. Electrochemical results also show that the tested electrodes with our method outperform conventional slurry processed electrodes, which is due to a better binder distribution. In addition, bonding tests of the dry-deposited particles onto the current collector show that the bonding strength is greater than slurry-cast electrodes, 127.14 kPa as compared to 84.29 kPa.