Integrals Power (Milton Keynes, U.K.; www.integralspower.co.uk) has started production of high-performance lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) and lithium-manganese-iron-phosphate (LMFP) cathode active materials at its pioneering new U.K. pilot plant. This milestone for the U.K. battery industry will help to accelerate the development of the domestic battery industry and achieve net zero ambitions.
Following successful laboratory trials, Integrals Power is now launching the U.K.’s first pilot plants producing the company’s proprietary high-performance LFP and LMFP nanomaterials. The new facility has an annual capacity of 20 tons, the equivalent to 250 electric cars, which will primarily be used for evaluation by cell suppliers, battery and vehicle manufacturers worldwide.
Establishing manufacturing in the U.K. is also a boost for the domestic battery industry by reducing its carbon footprint, enhancing supply chain security and transparency, and mitigating geopolitical issues such as import tariffs on electric vehicles and their components. Quality is equally important: Integrals Power’s LFP materials have been assessed as ultra-high purity in a third-party analysis using cutting-edge X-ray diffusion technology to study attributes such as chemical composition and lattice structure of the molecules – these are key to the performance of the material when built into battery cells.
Integrals Power Founder and CEO, Behnam Hormozi, said: “Start of production in our new pilot plant is a key milestone because it enables us to produce our high-performance LFP and LMFP cathode active materials at volume. We believe this is one of the first facilities of its kind in the U.K. and is exactly the kind of state-of-the-art resource the U.K. battery industry needs in order to support the sustainable future growth of electromobility.
“The flexibility and scalability we’ve designed into the pilot plant from day one enables us to manufacture different grades of lithium-iron-phosphate nanomaterials to suit different applications – from long-range electric vehicles through to off-grid energy storage – and to increase capacity to meet demand from customers in the UK and from around the world.”
Developed in-house, Integrals Power has created a modular production facility which can be readily scaled to higher volumes in the future to meet growing customer demand, and also to enable a range of different chemistries to be made. The process takes place over seven stages, and from raw materials to packaged samples ready for customers takes up to 48 hour.
Integrals Power sources all its raw materials from European and North American suppliers which ensures a purer, higher performance LFP and LMFP cathode materials with greater energy density compared to the Chinese-manufactured cathode materials.