Roll-to-Roll Production of Flexible Composite Solid-State Electrolytes for Lithium Metal Batteries in Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicles using Gravure Printing 2

To make electric vehicles more competitive with ICE vehicles, the United States Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC) has listed a set of goals for future lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) to meet, which includes a higher specific energy (275 Wh/kg) and energy output (50 kWh).

Since current LIBs aren’t capable of reaching these goals, rechargeable lithium-metal batteries have been of particular interest in recent years. However, due to the dendrite growth issue of lithium metal anodes, the key factor in commercializing lithium-metal batteries is to develop suitable solid-state electrolytes (SSE) to replace the organic liquid electrolytes. Among the SSE materials, sulfide ceramics are the most promising owing to their high ionic conductivity and stability.

To overcome the issue of brittleness at large-scale production, the fabrication of composite SSE is a promising route. Herein, a low-cost roll-to-roll method is developed using a proprietary ceramic/polymer composite. The ceramic/polymer composite slurry is developed so that it can be tape cast into high ionic conductive and mechanically flexible and strong membranes. The membrane is assembled into all-solid-state lithium batteries in coin cell and pouch cell format and evaluated for its performance. The slurry is used to develop a scalable Gravure Printing process to make the process more appropriate for mass production and easily integrated with mass production assembly lines.

Commercial Value: The engineering of a proprietary composite solid electrolyte membrane and a method of manufacturing thereof.