SINGAPORE, Oct 25 (Reuters) – Tightening markets for liquefied natural gas (LNG) worldwide and major oil producers cutting supply have put the world in the middle of “the first truly global energy crisis“, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.
If so, should we take more action immediately to reduce energy consumption during the production of EV lithium-ion battery cells? As long as wetting coating technology is adopted for li-ion battery cell electrode fabrication, as long as PVDF is used, NMP is unavoidable to be used to dissolve the powder of PVDF binder. Then to match the environmental protection rules, a recovery to NMP is a must. Then extra energy is consumed during the recovery of NMP.
According to the research article “Water-Based Electrode Manufacturing and Direct Recycling of Lithium-Ion Battery Electrodes—A Green and Sustainable Manufacturing System“,
NMP is expensive and reprotoxic and has been added to the restricted substances list by the European Commission in 2018. In addition, about 47% of the total process energy in LIB manufacturing is consumed in the electrode drying process for evaporation and recovery of NMP solvent, a quarter of which can be reduced when replacing NMP with water (Wood et al.,2018). Another 29% of total energy is consumed by the dry room facility to support slurry mixing and casting operations for moisture and temperature control (Yuan et al., 2017).
There are more and more technologies and products such as PAA, SBR, and CMC which can be dissolved by Water. This is making it easy for replacing NMP with Water and reduce energy consumption for EV battery cell manufacturing.
