Swedish sodium-ion battery developer ALTRIS was selected by InnoEnergy as one of the winning applications for a 2-year innovation project that aimed to scale up its cathode material for Na-ion batteries. The InnoEnergy’s Innovation Project initiative selects companies with sustainable energy innovations that have high commercial potential and provides them with investment funding.
FENNAC project focused on two areas: production scale-up / commercialisation of Fennac, as well as performance and safety testing. ALTRIS was thankful to be joined by two heavyweight partners to realise this project. Ahlstrom-Munksjö, a French manufacturer of fiber-based products that provided heat-resistant separators for the Fennac-based battery cells and CIDAUT the Foundation for Transport and Energy Research and Development in Spain to develop and perform safety cell testing.
https://www.altris.se/news/scaling-up-production-of-fennac-in-2022
The project kicked off in July 2021 with an extensive feasibility study, which included analysis of the market, competitors, value chain, IP protection strategy, business model, and financial projections. The project finished in July 2023 and the outcomes of the project were presented including the design of the pilot production line, procurement of the required large-scale equipment, the design of the recycling system and the required equipment from Altris. CIDAUT also presented his extensively work on the development of test protocols for the safety of Fennac-based cells, with results from the cell components mechanical deformation analysis, the different abuse tests on the complete cells and the simulation models developed in the project to understand the severity of failures in the Na-ion batteries.
Outcomes from the FENNAC project were recently presented from ALTRIS with their commercial-sized sodium-ion battery cell with the highest energy density to date (160 Wh/kg). This achievement is made in a research partnership with NORTHVOLT, a Swedish supplier of high-quality battery cells, which intends to use sodium-ion technology as a foundation for its next-generation energy storage solutions in upcoming markets.