The battery era is well underway. Lithium-ion batteries have changed the game completely and have had a significant impact on our day-to-day lives. They power the world around us, from smart mobile devices to pollution-free electric cars and intelligent power management solutions.
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With an eye on the future, batteries could potentially deliver an economical solution for mass energy storage and enhance renewable energy resources for power grid applications. Yet, despite these many advances, safety and performance gaps remain throughout battery technologies.
The continued mass-scale roll-out of batteries in applications like electric vehicles requires significant cost reductions to remain economically viable. Increased consumer demand and stricter regulations are driving battery material research, but on the agenda is improving production efficiency to minimize production costs. When fine margins dictate success, today’s manufacturers must be able to consistently ensure total quality and performance.
Malvern Panalytical has more than six decades of experience in designing, manufacturing, and supplying analytical instruments and can provide a complete range of laboratory and online analytical solutions.
Whether you are a battery component manufacturer looking to optimize process efficiency and improve quality control or a researcher trying to quantify the performance parameters of emerging battery materials, Malvern Panalytical’s solutions will give you greater insight and control to oversee the production of superior-quality batteries.
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Monitor and Optimize at Every Stage
Battery component manufacturers must consistently deliver good final product quality throughout the manufacturing process to ensure good final product quality. The continuity of the manufacturing workflow means any impurities or errors that occur in the early stages of production will accumulate, leading to larger consequences later down the production line.
Therefore, product quality must be tracked at each process phase, from acquiring raw materials to cell assembly. This ensures efficiency in the production process while minimizing waste. Similarly, research into new battery materials must determine what parameters could significantly impact battery performance throughout manufacturing.
Malvern Panalytical has developed a range of research and quality control solutions to support manufacturers and help them track and optimize all phases of the battery manufacturing process. The unique set of physical, chemical, and structural analysis possibilities that Malvern’s technologies offer can be applied at the various stages of the battery component production process.
Table 1. Battery materials and analytical solutions along the battery value chain. Source: Malvern Panalytical Ltd
| Battery materials |
Critical Parameters |
Analytical techniques |
Product and solutions |
Cathode precursor and
electrode materials |
Particle size
Particle shape
Chemical composition
Crystal phase |
Laser diffraction
Automated Imaging
X-ray fluorescence
X-ray diffraction |
Mastersizer 3000
Morphologi 4
Epsilon 4 / Zetium XRF
Aeris compact XRD |
| Battery slurry |
Particle size
Particle shape |
Laser diffraction
Automated Imaging |
Mastersizer 3000
Morphologi 4 |
| Electrode coating |
Coat weight
Coating thickness |
Photon sensor
Microcaliper thickness sensor |
Photon and Micro caliper
sensors from NDC technologies |
| Battery cell |
Degradation mechanism during cycling |
In operando XRD |
Empyrean XRD |
From enhancing electrode material quality to expediting the development of new high-performance battery materials, Malvern Panalytical can further empower manufacturers to develop and produce the highest-performing batteries.
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Optimize Cathode Materials
Cathode material production provides a first illuminating glance at how Malvern Panalytical solutions can ensure quality at each stage of the manufacturing process.
Quality control is crucial for cathode manufacturing, one of the first stages in battery production. However, battery manufacturers must minimize costs when implementing this phase.
Current cathode materials of interest, including NCA and NMC, are produced via co-precipitation of a transition metal hydroxide precursor, succeeded by calcination (lithiation and oxidation) with a lithium compound.
Malvern Panalytical’s morphological, structural, and elemental insights can help manufacturers achieve the following:
- Optimization of process parameters
- Ensure consistent quality while reducing production costs
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These solutions can be applied as cathode characterization tools at various stages of the cathode production process, from co-precipitation and precursor quality control to optimizing calcination and the final material.
These solutions allow manufacturers access to morphological, structural, and elemental insights, facilitating the optimization of process parameters accordingly to guarantee the highest-quality cathode materials.
Characterization Tools
Particle Size: Identifying consistent cathode-material particle size begins with the Insitec online tool. This tool allows manufacturers to analyze particle size in real-time at the precursor or milling stage. Fine control over particle size distribution is crucial for the quality of the electrode coating. With the Mastersizer 3000, accurate particle size analysis is made easy.
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Particle Shape: Particle shape impacts key parameters like electrode slurry rheology and packing density. Analyzing particle size and shape at the precursor stage with Morphologi 4 imaging enables automated analysis of thousands of particles with greater statistical accuracy.
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Elemental Composition: In combination with fusion sample preparation recipes, Malvern Panalytical’s Epsilon 4 benchtop X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometer or premium Zetium spectrometer can make the chemical composition and elemental impurity analysis of electrode materials much easier to run.
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Crystalline Phase: The crystalline phase and crystallite size are the essential parameters that define the quality of electrode materials. Malvern’s Aeris compact X-Ray diffractometer is considered the benchmark across industry for crystalline phase composition analysis, which can be leveraged to optimize the calcination process.
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Zeta Potential: Zeta potential can be utilized to optimize process parameters like pH and concentration to manage slurry stability, agglomeration, and sedimentation behavior. Malvern Panalytical’s Zetasizer is suitable for analyzing the zeta potential of dispersion as well as the size and agglomerate state of nanosized materials.
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This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by Malvern Panalytical Ltd.
For more information on this source, please visit Malvern Panalytical Ltd.