In September, a BearLITE^® (Battery electrode advanced rapid Light Initiated Thermal Emission)-based pilot production line for Li-battery electrodes has been started-up successfully at one of the leading Asian battery manufacturers.

The adphos proprietary BearLITE^®-drying technology allows the processing and drying of wet electrode coatings in the blink of an eye (less than ten seconds) and is extremely energy efficient, the power consumption of standard convection dryers can be reduced by over 85 %!

The stand-alone solution installed at the customer has proven proper production

Everyone, whether in private households or in industry and crafts, has now unmistakably experienced the enormous price increases for fossil fuels for heat and electricity.

Countering these enormous additional costs, even in the short term, certainly involves saving and thus reducing consumption. However, a distinction must be made here as to whether less of the same is used or whether alternative options are used for the respective heat or energy consuming process. In both cases, innovative, efficient technologies are of outstanding importance and the use in the short-term of verified

In coil coating, galvanizing, pickling or other coil processing applications, the drying and thermal processes are key contributors to the healthy bottom line of business.

With more than 20 years’ experience in thermal processing, adphos Thermal Processing GmbH, is proud to introduce aNIR^®-BAT technology, the Best Available Technology in Coil Processing, which ensures the utmost in speed, efficiency, and profitability in coil processing – and guarantees the lowest CO2-emissions.

aNIR^®-BAT allows:

• • Extremely compact and dynamic operations beyond that of all other technologies

For decades fossil fired convection driers/ovens have been applied in most processing lines.

Whether for flexo, gravure, heat set or screen – printing presses or wet-coating processing of adhesives, lacquering, infiltrations hotair driers have been the industry standard. Even though these driers build large, are not very dynamic and not very flexible for process variation adjust-ments – but low energy operation costs due to the low gas price to electricity price – ratio (mostly < 1/3 even down to sometimes < 1/5!).

So electro-thermal, like induction or infrared process systems have not been competitive. What makes

In 2021 several thermal process lab and pilot systems for different, even multilayer, battery coating applications and a first high speed separator coating drying system to a leading Asian customer, has been delivered.

Early this year also two aNIR-drying and thermal processing systems for production of sheet fed based battery (electrodes), with a productivity of up to 500 components/h, have been successfully started. Drying and thermal process requirements with adphos proprietary aNIR solutions have been reduced from several minutes/component down to less than 3 seconds (!). This

Complex multilayer production process consisting of electronical and insulation conduction layers, anode/cathode layers, sealings and electrolyte paste based layers, either solvent or water-based, with wet coating thicknesses between a few microns (≤ 15 µm) up to several hundred (even ≥ 500 µm) are dried and sintered with coatings/layers adapted aLITE^® process steps, all within one-digit seconds (even partially ≤ 1 s). The conventional drying and post-processing´s (heat and/or sintering) for these coatings would require minimum 30 s up to several minutes. The tremendous space savings