The Pivotal Role of Cathode Active Material in Northvolt
Girma Gebresenbut
NorthVolt
In Europe, Northvolt is the first Li-ion battery Giga-factory established in 2016. It aspires not only to address the increasing Li-Ion battery demand but also manufacture them in the greenest way. Such Bold plan need circular integration where the sourcing of raw materials, production of batteries and recycling need to feed each other in an efficient way. A delicate task that requires wide ranges of Excellent expertise ranging from traditional mining to modern days artificial intelligence where degradation of batteries could be speculated a head of time. In our company, there is a wide room for conveying innovative ideas that could directly impact the use of energy and resources in Northvolt. Several multidisciplinary collaborations with academia and industry are ongoing to tackle our challenges with an increasing demand for Passionate collaborators.
Northvolt produces high energy density Li-Ion battery that uses Li-(Ni, Co, Mn)O2 (NMC) as cathode. The cathode, with an estimated cost of around 40 % of the battery, is the most expensive and strategically important component of the battery. Typically, we need to produce several tones of NMC material every day whose properties are fine-tuned in a sub-microscopic level. Controlling particle size and morphology, chemical compositions in PPB level, homogeneous coatings of particles in nano-meter scale and optimum doping at preferred crystallographic sites are some of the opportunities and challenges that we are facing today. The cathode development R&D team sets the best parameters for producing efficient NMC material and deliver it to the production team. In this meeting, the typical process of developing a cathode material for the purpose of mass production in a giga-factory will be briefly presented from the perspective of a material engineer in the team.