It is anticipated that Integrals Power’s ‘bottom up’ approach to producing proprietary high-performance Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) and Lithium Manganese Iron Phosphate (LMFP) [BH1] cathode active nanomaterials will help to accelerate the development of Britain’s domestic battery industry and help also to achieve its net zero ambitions.
The new facility has an annual capacity of 20 tonnes, which will be used primarily for evaluation by cell suppliers, battery and vehicle manufacturers worldwide.
The company believes that establishing manufacturing in the UK can reduce the carbon footprint of the domestic battery industry, enhance supply chain security and transparency, and mitigate geopolitical issues such as import tariffs on EVs and their components.
Integrals Power’s LFP materials have been assessed as 99.9 per cent [BH2] pure in a third-party analysis using X-ray diffusion technology to study attributes such as chemical composition and lattice structure of the molecules, key attributes to the performance of the material when built into battery cells.
Integrals Power Founder and CEO, Behnam Hormozi, said the flexibility and scalability designed into the pilot plant enables the company to manufacture different grades of Lithium Iron Phosphate nanomaterials to suit different applications – from long-range electric vehicles through to off-grid energy storage – and to increase capacity to meet demand from customers in the UK and abroad.
Integrals Power said it sources its raw materials from European and North American suppliers which ensures purer, higher performance LFP and LMFP cathode materials with greater energy density compared to the Chinese-manufactured cathode materials that account for around 90 per cent of production worldwide.
“In [our] bottom-up approach, we use pure materials, lithium, iron as well as phosphoric acid, as the initial materials to start with,” said Hormozi. “We're not using [bulk] precursors.”
Hormozi continued: “It's all about your particle properties, and if you can control those particle properties, you've done a great job. In our approach, we have almost full control on the actual particle properties.”
The result is a cathode that, for a given size, enables the cell to store up to 30 per cent more energy, release it more quickly, and undergo more charging cycles with less reduction in capacity, delivering battery packs that are smaller, lighter, and more durable.
In December 2023, the company announced that its first-generation LFMP cathode material achieved a matching specific capacity as LFP with an extra 15 per cent energy density.
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