Battery interconnects & industrial bottlenecks to electrification

I thank ASM for organising a technical discussion on lithium ion battery interconnects. A typical battery pack could contain anywhere from a couple to thousands of cells depending upon whether it's being used for consumer electronics or high power EVs.

Battery chemistry requires different electrode materials and the same battery chemistry requires different current collectors at Cathode(Al) and Anode (Cu). This works for individual cells. During assembly however when the cells have to be connected in series or in parallel things break down.

Because Al & Cu don't weld well and they suffer from galvanic corrosion, new material processing techniques are necessary to enable fast wiring of batteries. Cold cladding is an industry standard that has now proven itself. Copper and aluminum are cold welded at high pressures and they form an airtight atomic bond without any intermediate oxide/intermetallic layer on the Al side.

This discussion highlighted Materions particular invention of side by side dovetail cladding which simplifies assembly,reduces errors during the assembly process and offers superior material properties that make interconnects more efficient and long lasting.

Cold Cladding delivers a cheap,high throughput method to create battery interconnects that is much simpler than the actual cell construction and packaging. Such solutions are essential to drive electrification. However it also highlights a critical problem with an all-electric future that I have addressed before. They are highly dependent on functional materials. Just the interconnection stage, as the discussion pointed out, needs an advanced cold cladding and annealing process based on high pressure material bonding in the range of 100s of MPA or in GPA. Generating these high pressures requires advanced tools. For consumer electronics it's fine, but for large volume energy storage where the production process will have to be distributed a simpler technology might prove better.

Electrification necessities overcoming immense industrial inertia where nations will be required to set up massive production facilities for packaging, speciality functional materials and industrial automation. While that's doable for countries that are already industrialized, delivering on sustainability goals while simultaneously industrializing could prove to be a bottleneck.

This is why it is important to pursue alternative sustainability solutions like e-fuels and hydrogen that can reduce production costs and build associated technology that make these systems more efficient.

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Akshat Jiwan Sharma

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Comments

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Akshat Jiwan Sharma

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