Sakuu prints 100% dry carbon fiber lithium-ion cell on Kavian platform, claims thermal runaway immunity

Sakuu, a provider of commercial-scale equipment and technologies to the battery and supercapacitor manufacturing industries, has printed a 100% dry anode and dry cathode metal-free battery cell using carbon composite and polymeric current collector (PCC) technology on its Kavian manufacturing platform. This fully functional metal-free cell delivers the safety benefits of PCC architecture and the structural integrity of carbon fiber while remaining flexible and extremely lightweight, the company says.

“The ability to manufacture safer batteries at scale is essential to meeting surging demand across industries, yet battery manufacturing technology has been stuck in a rut for 30 years,” said Arwed Niestroj, President and COO of Sakuu. “Our dry-printed carbon fiber PCC test cell demonstrates how to produce innovative batteries that can safely power—and also conform to and strengthen—new structural designs in transportation and energy storage systems.”

Sakuu’s carbon fiber test cell is a fully functional lithium-ion 0.5 Ahr battery cell. The company says it’s immune to thermal runaway, and is made with lightweight, inexpensive and globally readily available materials.

Dry-processed PCC cells possess several advantages over the standard wet-processed lithium-ion battery cells, Sakuu explains. “A PCC cell is a series-connected battery, not parallel-connected. PCC cells are still made layer by layer, but each layer is individually sealed and connected directly, one on top of the other. The layers use a thin conductive polymer film and current flows vertically up through a stack of sealed layers, moving from one layer to the next over the entire surface of contact. Any short, defect, or puncture in the cell results in a slow dissipation of energy that does not produce excessive heat and thesrefore cannot produce fire.”

These cells are not yet widely available because they cannot be made with standard wet-process manufacturing equipment—but Sakuu says they can be mass-produced cost-effectively with the company’s dry-process manufacturing technology.

Thin polymer films are flimsy and subject to wrinkling, Sakuu CTO Karl Littau tells us. “Wrinkles are defects that could make good electrical contact difficult or impossible. Carbon fiber doesn’t wrinkle. It has unique properties that add strength and electrical conductivity to the composite in a PCC cell. Using carbon fiber veils allows us to make strong yet conformable and flexible electrode layers and current collector layers: The fibers not only penetrate the current collector, but are also embedded within the dry powder anode and cathode. This ensures intimate contact of the adjacent layers in a cell and provides a robust reinforcing network, which also conducts electricity quite well.”

Source: Sakuu