Printing technology as green alternative for thick layer Li Ion Battery electrode production

The need for more ecological and sustainable production technologies is a general demand for competitive battery manufacturing factories in the future. The energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions are cost-driving factors and at the same time have high increasing social impacts. Solutions for making electrode production greener can be realized by avoiding or replacing toxic and harmful materials, e.g. by aqueous processing. Also less solvent requiring processes may lead to less extensive drying efforts. Screen-printing technology for electrode manufacturing combines both environmental benefits and enables for thick film electrode production with high areal capacities especially for high energy cells (up to 5…8 mAh/cm 2 ). In this work it will be shown that the solvent amount can be decreased by about 20% by processing of highly filled pastes. In addition, it is possible to enable a multilayer printing and therefore sequential and fast drying as well as near-net-shape printing leading to less waste upon production. The thickness and high areal capacity of the printed coatings lead to new design aspects of the electrode structure affecting full cell performance. Some insights will be given with regard to current-rate capability, useable capacity, porosity and efficiency of ion- exchange pathways. The screen-printing process is a scalable and established series production technology. The high accuracy, energy efficiency and low emissions are strongly in line with the goals of green production.