First UK pilot plant for LFP battery materials
UK startup Integrals Power (IPL) has started production of Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) and Lithium Manganese Iron Phosphate (LMFP) cathode active materials from European and US sources.
The production of LFP and LMFP cathode materials by Integrals Power has started at a pilot plant in Milton Keynes, UK, with a capacity of 20 tonnes for evaluation by cell suppliers, battery and vehicle manufacturers worldwide.
The design of the plant is modular and 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 hours.
IPL has been awarded six UK government grants to date to scale-up LFP and other cathode manufacturing process and improve the cathode materials performance. These projects enabled IPL to prove and verify their cathode performance in different applications and scales including battery cell and pack for Aerospace and Off-grid energy storage market.
Establishing manufacturing in the UK is also a boost for the domestic battery industry with enhanced supply chain security and transparency and mitigating geopolitical issues such as import tariffs on EVs 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 X-ray diffusion technology to study attributes such as chemical composition and lattice structure of the molecules. This has shown the materials to have higher performance than materials from China.
“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 UK and is exactly the kind of state-of-the-art resource the UK battery industry needs in order to support the sustainable future growth of electromobility,” said Integrals Power Founder and CEO, Behnam Hormozi.
“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.”
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