In May of last year, we began an Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) funded collaborative project with the national battery manufacturing development facility, the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC). The objective of the project, named BUS100, was to determine if a MWh-level manufacturing line for Ilika’s Goliath solid state batteries (SSB) could, in principle, be installed economically at UKBIC, utilising some of the existing lithium-ion battery manufacturing (LIB) equipment in order to supply automotive cells to Ilika’s customers at an acceptable price point. Demonstrating cell manufacturing on production-intent equipment, at MWh-scale, is key to Ilika’s scale up plans. This would de-risk future mass-production of its SSB cells at GWh-level and enable adoption by an automotive OEM’s platform.
The project was a follow-up from the SOLSTICE collaborative project we carried out with Comau which concluded that 70% of existing LIB equipment can be re-used for SSB manufacture.
Ilika plc (LON:IKA) is a pioneer in solid state battery technology enabling solutions for applications in Industrial IoT, MedTech, Electric Vehicles and Consumer Electronics.
