June 20, 2018 | News Brief | 
has announced that Porocarb, its line of functional carbon additives, has been successfully implemented in a customer’s lithium-ion battery production in Taiwan. This marks the company’s first implementation in a full manufacturing environment and represents a major step forward in the additive’s global commercial rollout.
The implementation project with LiS, a Taiwan-based lithium-ion battery developer, began in mid-2017. Heraeus worked with LiS production experts to develop a special formulation of Porocarb to the specific technical manufacturing requirements of one of its customers in central Chaina. Porocarb (a non-agglomerated, highly-porous carbon with fully interconnected macroporosity) and carbon nano tubes were then implemented as a pre-formulated carbon system.
The non-agglomerated Porocarb particles are designed to maintain their open porosity, even under high packaging densities, allowing for easy electrolyte access. This open porosity significantly improves the ionic conductivity, reduces diffusion limitations, and increases power densities and charge/discharge acceptance. Once implemented into the customer’s production process, the synergetic effect between Porocarb and carbon nano tubes enabled LiS to achieve significant product, process and performance improvements, including: improved C-rate performance and higher energy density; higher pressing density and increased electrode loading; and reduction of formation time by 40 percent.
“Case studies and laboratory research are important, but the true test of a battery additive comes when it is put into a real world production environment,” said LiS CEO, Dr. Meng Lung Lee. “The results were impressive and it will enable LiS to deliver higher-performing lithium-ion batteries to the market.”
Porocarb is specially tailored for the unique technical requirements of Lithium-ion, lead-acid and electric double layer capacitors (super-capacitors). Porocarb is easy to process as a carbon powder, a pre-formulated electrode slurry (paste) or as a cabon-nano-tube/Porocarb dispersion.
