With £36m in funding, the new line is expected to bridge the gap between UKBIC’s existing Volume Industrialisation Line (VIL) and kilogramme scale demonstrator lines available elsewhere.
Construction of FIL is set to get underway in September of this year, with the equipment coming online during 2025.
According to UKBIC, the new line will provide battery developers with a cost-effective route to market, enabling companies to move from R&D through to large-scale production, without having to take cell development outside of the UK. Once completed, FIL will be owned by UKBIC and operated jointly by UKBIC and Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG).
Funding for the new line is being provided by UK Research and Innovation as part of the UK government’s Faraday Battery Challenge, a £541m investment programme supporting technology development and manufacturing scale-up capability for batteries in the UK.
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Tony Harper, director of the Faraday Battery Challenge, said: “When customers leave laboratories or pilot lines for product development, there is still a huge amount of process iteration required before cells can be successfully scaled at the cost, quality, and performance required for giga-scale production.
“UKBIC’s existing Volume Industrialisation Line is ideally placed for the later stages of manufacturing process to validate that product can be made in volumes of tens of thousands and above. This is where it becomes cost-effective and representative of an industrial plant run, and therefore a vital part of the commercialisation process.
“The gap for the UK is in early production quantities, between the low hundreds and low thousands of cells, which is where our new line will come in.”
Since it opened in July 2021, Coventry-based UKBIC has supported 24 advanced scale up and industrialisation battery technology projects across numerous battery developers and end users.
Dr Ahmad Mohsseni, UKBIC CTO, said: “The construction of this new facility will be hugely significant for UKBIC and the UK battery industry. Once built, this new Flexible Industrial Line will provide companies with a unique platform to enable them to get a foot on the scale-up ladder, from Research & Development through to volume manufacturing.
“Companies can find it incredibly difficult to source the volume of advanced materials required for early scale trial and demonstration – the smaller the quantity needed, the better for executing early-stage optimisation cycles and production trials. To date, we have mitigated the amount of material and time required for running our larger scale manufacturing equipment for early customers through developing techniques such as half-width coating, running at slower speeds and half mix batches of slurry, but more is needed to support industry with a truly cost-effective route to commercialisation.”
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