Toray Industries, Inc. (Tokyo; www.toray.com) announced that it has decided to construct a new large-scale facility to manufacture carbon paper for electrode substrates of fuel-cell stacks at its Ehime Plant (Masaki-cho, Iyo-gun, Ehime, Japan). Toray is currently working on application of carbon paper in fuel-cell stacks with several customers and the development has been making good progress. The company will newly build a facility, with a production capacity about five times the existing facility, at its Shiga Plant to respond to the future increase in demand for the material. The company aims to complete the construction in May 2018 and introduce cutting-edge equipment that would enable efficient production of high value-added carbon paper.
Toray has been continuing with the development of carbon paper for electrode substrates of fuel cell stacks over the past 30 years, and its paper has been adopted for the fuel cell vehicle MIRAI, introduced in December 2014 by Toyota Motor Corp., and another fuel cell vehicle CLARITY FUEL CELL, launched in March 2016 by Honda Motor Co.