Albemarle opens an innovation center for drum materials in North Carolina

Albemarle is certainly not a household name, but it is a major producer of chemicals based in the United States, especially those used in the production of lithium batteries. Lithium batteries are essential to all kinds of electronic devices and are particularly critical for electric vehicles. The company has announced that it has opened an innovation center for battery materials (BMIC) and its Kings, North Carolina mountain site. 

BMIC will be fully operational in July 2021 and will support lithium hydroxide from society, lithium carbonate and advanced energy storage platforms. The installation is designed to allow the synthesis of the new materials, the characterization of the property of materials and the analysis. It also supports the scale of material scale capabilities and hardware integration in battery cells for performance tests.

The installation has a dry room with a line of multi-layer pocket cells that can create cells from the size of a cell to demonstrate critical performance aspects and accelerate the transition of new products to customers. BMIC will also develop lithium-metal anode technology to increase the energy density of the battery using the advanced decision of metal lithium to obtain 20 microns thick lithium leaves. Twenty microns is about one fifth the average thickness of a human hair.

The installation will demonstrate even thinner lithium leaves with a thickness of 3 to 5 microns using new technologies under development. Albemarle says that its BMIC provides realistic and relevant cellular building capacity for generating data for the design of new generation battery materials. The company will take advantage of resources to optimize the materials to create a solution lowered to customers to help provide efficient and cost-effective batteries in the electric vehicle market.

Albemarle is the only American producer of lithium-metal anodes. The company indicates that new materials developed in its laboratories will allow the next frontier of lithium-ion battery performance. Passing conventional graphite battery anodes with lithium metal offers the potential for dual energy density and reduces the cost of 50%.