greenSPEED · Green and Sustainable Processes for Electrode Production

Lithium-ion technology is the means to greener and more sustainable mobility and other mobile applications, but the process of cell manufacturing is still energy consuming and using environmentally harmful substances. The greenSPEED project offers solutions for new sustainable electrode and cell manufacturing processes with reduced energy consumption, lower carbon footprint and ZERO Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) emissions.To that aim, the project main target is developing a battery cell comprised of electrodes manufactured by innovative dry processes. Our composite cathode, based on Ni-rich NMC, is to be manufactured by scalable roll-to-roll dry electrode coating process, that fully removes the use of casting-solvents and eliminates the need of energy-intense drying-, condensate and transportation process required in state-of-the-art electrode fabrication. The greenSPEED high-capacity pure-silicon anode is to be manufactured taking full advantage of our innovative process based on Microwave-Assisted Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (MW-PECVD), which deposits porous silicon directly on the copper current-collector starting from locally produced silane gas (SiH4). Moreover, the use of advanced modelling and simulation techniques including digital twins, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are to be employed to predict and optimise cell performance in early development stages, support the cell production process by virtually assessing the influence and importance of production parameters and thus minimising the number of experiments and to accelerate electrode production optimisation steps. The greenSPEED cell aims at increasing energy density (+69%) while reducing energy consumption (-32%) and costs (-21%) of production as compared to state-of-the-art Li-ion cells. The concepts here proposed have been already demonstrated at TRL 2/3 with the aim of reaching TRL 5/6 by the end of the project.