High-Performance Battery Manufacturing

Highly efficient dissolvers, bead mills, and basket mills are designed for the challenges of battery slurry development. In this presentation, we’ll review the milling and dispersing requirements, processes, and best practices. High-performance dispersing and milling equipment are required for optimum performance of battery slurries.

This presentation will focus on the foundational discovery of the Internal Spot Shorting–Induced Thermal Runaway Mechanism (ISSITRM), establishing that catastrophic lithium-ion battery failures originate from localized internal short circuits—not from uniform bulk heating as traditionally interpreted by DSC/ARC analysis. Direct evidence from internal short resistance (R_sc) characterization, nail penetration voltage signatures, laser-induced short simulations, and gas chemistry analysis of thermal runaway events reveals the true initiation pathway of fire and explosion. These findings redefine lithium-ion battery failure physics. Decades of IEEE P1625 and P1725 safety standard discussions and global field experience indicate that internal short–induced thermal runaway accounts for the overwhelming majority of safety incidents. The presentation will outline prevention methodologies developed across the industry and highlight the most effective engineering solution—ceramic-coated separators (CCS)—which suppress short-circuit propagation and have fundamentally advanced real-world battery safety. The nail test failures (Internal Shorts fire/explosion) of various SOLID STATE BATTERIES will be presented and discussed.

Lithium-metal battery performance is closely tied to lithium-foil quality, yet no industry-wide standards exist to evaluate or compare it. We present a unified assessment framework that integrates structural, chemical, and electrochemical analyses to link lithium-metal properties with cycling behavior. Benchmarking foils from multiple suppliers highlights the key factors governing anode performance and provides practical metrology to ensure consistent, high-quality lithium-metal supply for next-generation batteries.

Current battery electrode manufacturing is complex, expensive, and dirty. This presentation will highlight the industrialization progress of AMB’s Powder to Electrode dry coating technology and how it will deliver performance benefits and superior economics. This session is particularly relevant for OEMs, battery manufacturers, investors, and newcomers in the battery ecosystem, and all those seeking to establish or scale battery production while reducing costs and environmental impact.

This presentation, will explore the foundational R&D breakthroughs and patent disputes that shaped LFP development. In addition, understanding how China has emerged as the global leader and why LFP is experiencing a strategic resurgence, will be presented. Also, attendees will gain insights into the evolving role of LFP and it’s potential across future applications.

To meet global demand for low-cost BEVs, battery manufacturing must change. Conventional wet coating electrode production is capital and energy intensive, and costly. Dry battery electrode production techniques can reduce cell production costs by up to 40%, however, performance and scalability are hindered by cumbersome dry mixing. Anaphite’s DCP technology solves these difficulties, creating flowable, homogeneous composite electrode powders with engineered particle interactions, enabling improved coating speeds and cell yields.

The replacement of N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) in lithium-ion battery cell manufacturing is a key step toward more sustainable and cost-effective production. In this work, we present the development of a high-energy lithium-ion battery cell fabricated using fully aqueous slurries for both cathode and anode electrodes. The approach was validated in multi-layer pouch cells with a nominal capacity of 15 Ah, demonstrating its applicability at an industrially relevant scale. The electrochemical performance and fabrication process of the aqueous-processed cells were systematically compared with reference cells produced using the same chemistry, format, and capacity, but manufactured with conventional NMP-based slurries. The comparison includes electrode processing characteristics as well as key performance electrochemical metrics such as capacity and cycling stability. The results show that fully aqueous electrode processing can deliver comparable performance to NMP-based cells while enabling a more sustainable and simplified manufacturing route. These findings support fully aqueous processing as a viable pathway for high-energy lithium-ion battery production.

This talk will review the different stages (electrode manufacturing, cell assembly, and cell formation) and steps (up to nineteen, ranging from mixing to coating to calendaring to electrolyte filling and OCV testing) and will explore approaches to reducing both capex and opex costs in each.

Stanford's STEER is launching a new platform called the OpenCell Project, aimed at scaling up commercial benchmarking efforts in a decentralized manner to better inform state-of-the-art innovation trends. At the heart of OpenCell is a new, snappy cell design tool capable of designing commercially relevant form factors using half-cell curves, but the true power of OpenCell comes from the database of digital twins. Both will be demoed in this talk.