Altech Chemicals submits patent with IP Australia for alumina coating of battery materials

The company on a track to become one of the world's leading suppliers of 99.99% (4N) high purity alumina (Al2O3), Altech Chemicals Limited has declared its submission of a patent with IP Australia, for its invention of methods for coating anode active materials with alumina.

The patent illustrates Altech's technology for alumina-containing coating. The alumina coating layer, when applied to anode materials such as graphite and silicon would serve as an artificial solid electrolyte interface (SEI), which is expected to reduce lithium-ion losses during each charge and discharge cycle of a rechargeable lithium-ion battery (e.g. as used in electric vehicles), and also retard degradation of battery capacity.

Altech made public on 12th September’20 that as an outcome of its ground-breaking research and development work, it was proceeding to an independent validation phase of its method for the alumina coating of graphite particles. In the initial phase coating trials, Altech manifested that it was able to apply very uniform and consistent nano-metre scale alumina coating layers on graphite anode particles. The particles were examined at the University of Western Australia under an electron microscope, where a thin continuous, regular coating of alumina was observed.

The effective first phase of battery testing of Altech's alumina coated graphite has also been accomplished and for the test, a batch of battery electrodes was produced using non-coated standard anode grade graphite particles (the control) and a separate batch was produced that contained anode grade graphite particles coated with HPA using the Company's technology. One hundred cycles of cell charge and discharge were completed and results for the coated graphite anodes compared to the non-coated anodes were positive and encouraging.