Publications

Lithium-ion battery cell formation: status and future directions towards a knowledge-based process design

The paper explores the battery cell formation process – one of the most critical yet least fully understood steps in lithium-ion battery manufacturing. It highlights how formation directly influences key performance metrics such as lifetime, safety, and efficiency, while also contributing significantly to production time, energy consumption, and cost. 

The review provides a structured overview of the underlying mechanisms and the many factors that shape the process, emphasizing the strong interdependence between material properties, cell design, and formation strategies. It also presents advanced experimental and simulation approaches aimed at improving process understanding and optimization. 

Finally, the paper outlines routes for development of tailored formation processes for next-generation battery technologies.

Information dense and industry scalable accelerated formation

The paper presents an advanced approach to battery cell formation aimed at overcoming the typical trade-offs between performance, cost, and production efficiency. Focusing on pulsed formation in lithium-ion cells with graphitic anodes, the study demonstrates how tailored charging protocols can significantly accelerate the formation process while maintaining – or even improving – key quality parameters such as capacity and overall cell performance. 

It shows that optimized pulsed charging can reduce formation time by more than 50 %, and validates the approach through successful scale-up to large-format prismatic cells. In addition to performance gains, the paper provides insights into the underlying mechanisms, linking the improvements to more uniform interphase formation, and introduces new opportunities for real-time quality assessment during the formation process.