Qld battery boosting technology clears manufacturing hurdle

Queensland battery materials start-up Nano-Nouvelle is claiming a “huge win” after successfully proving that its lithium-ion battery boosting nanotechnology can be mass produced for the commercial market.

As we have reported here before, Nano-Nouvelle’s technology, which has come from being purely conceptual in 2011, is a three-dimensional nano-structured, porous electrode aimed at overcoming the limitations of current batteries by allowing them to charge faster and last longer than current commercial competitors.

The Sunshine Coast-based company said on Monday that it had successfully completed its first roll-to-roll production trial one of its key materials, with UK manufacturing company Cemco successfully running a roll of raw membrane through a chemical plating process to produce a roll of copper-plated Lumafoil.

Nano-Nouvelle’s Copper Lumafoil weighs up to 70 per cent less than current collectors used in lithium-ion batteries and offers faster electrolyte wetting, which can result in up to 12 per cent reduction in battery cell assembly cost.

Nano-Nouvelle CEO Stephanie Moroz said the successful roll-to-roll trial was at least 100 times faster than the company’s original manual plating process with equivalent quality.

The manufacturing breakthrough follows on from two deals with US battery makers, secured in July, to road-test the battery boosting 3D nanotechnology, while providing an entry point to the key global market.

In June 2015, the company successfully closed a $3.7 million funding round, after its promising technology attracted the interest of several high profile cleantech investors, including Simon Hackett, the CEO of Brisbane based maker, Redflow.

“This is huge win for us,” Moroz said of the successful manufacturing trial in a statement on Monday. “This is the first time we have proved that our technology can be made in a mass production process. We can now produce rolls of the material for larger batteries to be used in customer field trials.

“Demonstrating that our nanostructure can be produced on a commercially viable production line gives us a route to full-scale production that other forms of nanotechnology can only dream of.”

Moroz said Nano-Nouvelle’s next step, in the new year, was to conduct more trials with customers to replicated the success in the next stages of battery assembly.