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CTO Karl Littau on the Volts podcast with David Roberts
Sakuu CTO Karl Littau recently appeared as a guest on the Volts podcast with David Roberts.
In the recent episode, titled "Are we finally getting 3D-printed batteries? A conversation with Karl Littau of Sakuu," they discussed a range issues in battery chemistry and production, including the many benefits in sustainability, scalability, safety, performance, and cost offered by the dry-printing process for electrodes and supercapacitors.
During the course of the chat, Karl likened the dry process in battery manufacturing to the familiar concept of laser printing documents. With a laser printer, he said, "there’s two steps: One is to pattern the toner, and then another one is the fuser that uses heat and pressure to stick it to the paper. The dry process for battery manufacturing is the same. It just uses heat and pressure in order to get the loose powder into a compact and cohesive and adhesive — meaning it sticks together — electrode that can go into the battery.”
When it comes to printing electrodes, Karl said “half of the battle is on the equipment to make the material uniform — to activate the binders with the fuser, the heat, and pressure, and to get it to stick together and work in the cell. The other half of it is what happens before. So the formulation of that dry powder is super important. It's not as simple as just taking the few ingredients, putting them in a blender, and turning it on....
It's highly engineered, where you put these materials together in a particular way with a particular process and a particular piece of equipment, balancing how they're mixed together. But then, even on the microscopic level, the ingredients in the battery are combined together to work very, very well in the printer and then very, very well in the battery.”
This is Sakuu's specialty, as demonstrated in the capabilities of our Kavian platform.
Karl also noted that “the electrodes in a supercapacitor are essentially the same. The materials are a little bit different, but it's still a mixture of powders and binders held together on a current collector. So it has the same kind of requirements, and the same advantages are in place for dry process.”
The opportunities afforded by thermoplastic properties in chemical binders for manufacturing innovation and cost reduction were also discussed, among other battery-related topics in this fascinating conversation.
For the full podcast audio and text transcript, visit Volts on Substack, or listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.