Development of High Performance Carbon coated LiFePO4 by a Cost-effective and Scalable Process

Lithium ion batteries play an important role in the field of electric vehicle (EV) industries due to their high energy density and power density in comparison to other secondary batteries. Though there exists a great demand for large quantities of electrode materials for EV application, many research groups focus on basic (lab scale R&D) research rather than large scale production of electrode materials. In contrast, ARCI focuses mainly on development of nano-structured electrode materials in large scale by cost-effective processes. Among cathode materials, LiFePO4 becomes promising for electric vehicle batteries due to their high energy density, structural and thermal stability.ARCI successfully developed a rapid, simple and cost-effective process to prepare in-situ carbon coated LiFePO4 (C-LFP) in large scale by adopting solid-state high-energy milling technique. The C-LFP so developed shows promising electrochemical properties in terms of high charge discharge capacity, excellent rate capability and long cyclic stability and hence it may be suitable for high energy as well as high power density lithium-ion battery application. The method developed for synthesizing C-LFP in this invention has the advantage of being cost effective, single step, and fast processing due to high kinetic energy system used for milling of powders.