![]() With projected building sites in Oklahoma and Kansas, the Panasonic expansion would augment Tesla’s plan to increase its in-house battery manufacturing with the new factory it is bringing online in Texas. Japanese media outlet NHK reported earlier this month that Panasonic plans to construct a US factory to supply Tesla with LIBs, seeking to ramp up production to meet anticipated demand for electric vehicles. Getting By with a Little Help from Its Panasonic Business Partner If it works, it will be cheaper and more efficient, but Musk freely admits it will be a challenge. “The very difficult part is then scaling up that production and achieving extremely higher reliability and safety with the cells,” he told a European battery conference in November 2020. ![]() Dry electrode manufacturing skips a traditional, complicated step of battery manufacturing that involves the chemical slurry. Russia was the third-largest nickel producer in 2021, producing over 200,000 tons.ĭry electrode technologies not only offer a way to reduce energy consumption in the battery cell making process - lowering the cost - but such innovations could also allow opportunities to augment the performance of today’s lithium-ion batteries in the near term. The pursuit of energy density has driven electric vehicle batteries from using lithium-iron-phosphate cathodes in early days to ternary-layered oxides increasingly rich in nickel however, as nickel is used in the production of EV batteries, any sanctions placed on Russian nickel will become a barrier to EV manufacturing. Prices of battery ingredients like nickel hit records this week on supply fears stemming from the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and Musk had already in January forecast battery supply constraints, making in-house production a key to growth. Cathodes contain nickel, which delivers high energy density, allowing the vehicle to travel further. Reuters offers a nice explanation about how EV batteries are charged and discharged by the flow of lithium ions between the graphite-containing anode and the cathode. The factory equipment for in-house battery manufacturing like this, Musk said, “doesn’t exist. “It’s really, really difficult to manufacture at a speed and at scale.” Meng is a University of Chicago professor who previously worked with Maxwell, a battery technology company acquired by Tesla. “He is changing the way how battery manufacturing is done,” Shirley Meng told Reuters. The Difficulty with Battery Manufacturing at Scale Further, the dry electrode process may improve energy and power density by enabling unique, dense, high-loading electrode microstructures. The dry coating ultimately reduces the slurry preparation and mixing step, lowers drying times, and eliminates the toxic volatile fumes from N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), solvent recovery, and recycling systems.Ĭompared to wet-processed materials, it is cost efficient and environmentally benign. Solvent omission in dry electrode processing substantially lowers the energy demand and allows for a thick, mechanically stable electrode coating. Research indicates that dry electrode mixing and coating would be revolutionary for large-scale LIB production. ![]() The priority within the battery technology has been aimed at achieving higher LIB energy capacities to compete with internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.ĭry electrode processing is part of the next generation of electrodes, as it reduces costs and eliminates toxicity to meet future battery production demands. Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are the storage technology of choice in state-of-the-art EVs, leading to a substantial growth in global LIB production. Tesla faces a lengthy process in ramping up its battery factory, though, complicated by plans to use a new manufacturing technology called dry electrode coating. Tesla can use a smaller number of new cells for the same energy and driving range, reducing costs. ![]() Tesla’s 4680 lithium-ion batteries - with 46-millimeter diameter and 80-millimeter length - hold about 5 times the energy of its current smaller 2170 cells. In late 2020, Musk announced that Tesla aimed to halve the costs of the most expensive part of an EV by producing its own batteries. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has set extraordinary goals for in-house battery production this year. ![]()
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