Altech Chemicals has put the finishing touches to its German-based pilot plant where it will look to produce a premium battery grade anode material coated with high purity alumina using its proprietary technology. The plant is designed to produce up to 37,000 kilograms of coated anode material per year and Altech’s testing to-date shows considerable efficiencies not currently available to battery makers.
Altech’s 75 per cent owned German subsidiary, Altech Industries Germany, or “AIG”, who will oversee the project in country, holds the golden ticket for exclusive use of Altech’s propriety battery materials coating technology within the European Union.
The company says the pilot plant will be installed in the Schwarze Pumpe Dock 3 facility neighbouring AIG’s recently acquired 14 hectare industrial site within the Schwarze Pumpe Industrial Park. Altech previously reported the site has been earmarked for the future development of a proposed 10,000 tonne per annum high purity alumina battery materials coating plant that is currently the subject of a preliminary feasibility study.
Plans are also afoot to build an onsite laboratory that Altech says will allow it to make the rapid tweaks and adjustments necessary to ensure product purity and enable changes in processing parameters to be modified quickly as required.
The company says final product purity is vital in the production chain and a key driver in selecting process equipment and the main materials of construction.
Altech is aiming to demonstrate that its process consistently hits the purity targets prior to optimising equipment design and process parameters for a full-scale commercial production plant.
The final product from the pilot plant will produce customer samples for testing and qualification.
With production sites for Volkswagen, BMW, Porsche, Daimler and Tesla conveniently located in the same Saxony-based industrial park, Altech looks set to have a string of possible customers within cooee that could potentially test its product.
Altech’s proprietary battery materials alumina coating technology has been hailed as a technical breakthrough cracking the “silicon barrier” to successfully produce a series of lithium-ion battery anode materials with 30 per cent more capacity than conventional graphite only anode materials.
Silicon has about ten times the energy retention capacity when compared to conventional graphite only anode material, according to Altech.
Electric vehicle heavyweight, Tesla recently declared the implementation of more silicon in battery anodes is a critical step to reducing the cost of lithium-ion batteries and improving their energy density.
A recent report by leading international provider of business research, BloombergNEF determined that some 58 per cent of all new manufactured vehicles by 2040 are projected to be either electric or hybrid. In Germany alone, electric vehicles are forecast to make up nearly 40 per cent of total sales by 2025, the report concluded.
With the rapid electrification of the world’s motorised fleet, a game changing technological breakthrough and a German-based operation strategically located on the doorstep of the European Union, Altech looks well poised on the precipice of the lithium-ion battery boom.
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By Matt Birney
