Large Scale Production of Lithium Titanate (Li4Ti5O12) Electrode Materials by Cost-effective & High Energy Milling 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. As there is a great demand for large quantities of electrode materials for EV application, ARCI is working on development of nano-structured electrode materials in large scale by cost-effective processes. Lithium titanium oxide (LTO) has emerged as a promising anode material for high-power LIBs owing to its abundance, low manufacturing cost, thermal stability, excellent cycle life of 20000 cycles and safety. LTO is also known as a ‘zero-strain’ material because it undergoes negligible volume change during charginf/discharging, which ensures an extremely long cycle life. Further, LTO anode based Li-ion batteries can work under harsh ambient temperatures (-30 to +55°C) and exhibit recharge efficiency exceeding 98%, compared to other carbon based anode materials. Hence, it is ideal for Indian climatic conditions where the temperature reaches 45-48 0C in summer, which is a motivating factor for indigenous LTO materials development. ARCI focused on developing the simple, economical scalable and energy efficient technique for production of LTO anode with improved electronic conductivity using TiO2 and Li2CO3 as precursors. The advantages of high energy milling method are short processing time, low contamination, high relative velocity of balls and high energy input. Further, ARCI’s technology has been tuned to be adaptable to any sort of precursers ARCI’s LTO has been validated in half cell and its performance was found to be very promising in terms of high specific capacity (170 mAh/g), good rate capability (20C) and long cyclic stability (upto 1000 cycles), which is better than the performance of coomercial LTO obtained from Geylon, China as it exhibits capacity of only 113 mAh/g with poor rate capability. Further LTO based LIB device (20 mAh capacity) fabricated in combination with high voltage cathode exhibited 80% retention of capacity after 1000 cycles. The production cost of ARCI’s LTO is comparable with the cost of imported LTO (~ 20 USD) by utilizing the pilot plant facility for the production of LTO at a level of 72kg/day. Patents are filed in India, USA, Japan, China, Germany and South Korea. A private company, who is making LTO based LIB for Hybrid Vehicle application is very much interested in ARCI’s LTO technology and efforts are underway for possible technology transfer.