As electrification of personal and commercial vehicles has been driving the development of Li-ion cells for non-consumer electrics, it has exerted huge pressure on both price and energy density requirements. However there are several markets which, comparably to the automotive industry, are niches. They have similar requirements in terms of pricing and energy density but at a different level and with different priorities. These markets, namely automated guided vehicles, marine, off highway vehicles, specialized road vehicles, and rail, have also specific requirements in terms of sizing and certifications which are not necessarily met by the large South-East Asian manufacturers. This trend towards electrification, or hybridization, will considerably reduce GHG emissions in cities and harbors, but also modernize transportation and logistics.
Leclanché is focusing on these markets, starting in Europe and expending to North-America and Asia. To respond to the different market needs, we manufacture two types of cells in our factory line in Germany: high power (HP) and high energy (HE) cells. Through the HD-BAT phase 1 SME Instrument project, we undertook a feasibility study for several improvements on both cell technology to decrease price and weight per energy unit. We considered two aspects. The first one was chemistry, where the integration of upcoming active materials into our water-based electrode processing has been studied. The second one concerns the engineering work necessary to manufacture a novel, denser design and also accepts thinner non-active components into our cells.
