Magnis produces first Li-ion battery dry cells at New York battery plant

New South Wales-based battery producer Magnis Energy Technologies has produced its first full sized prismatic lithium-ion dry battery cells at its Imperium3 New York (iM3NY) battery plant.

Last month, Magnis announced that it had recently purchased equipment from a battery production plant previously operated by Chinese battery manufacturer A123 Systems in Michigan.

The purchase boosted Imperium3 New York’s annual production capacity to 1.8GWh and provided the company with the flexibility to produce a variety of different battery cell designs.

This followed a February funding round which raised $34 million which was used to fast track the commencement of production at iM3NY, and another investment worth $110 million that fully funded gigawatt-scale production at iM3NY.

Production of the company’s extra-fast charge lithium-ion batteries is expected to begin in early 2022, with testing and customer sampling through the latter half of this year.

But Magnis’ announcement last Friday that it had produced its first full sized prismatic lithium-ion battery cells was big news, as it was ahead of schedule and demonstrated the results of the year’s earlier investments and purchases.

The first of the company’s battery cells were produced using manual settings to refine the product design for future automated production, working as a firs stage of demonstration of the company’s ability to synchronise material science, engineering, and process knowledge to produce a commercially viable lithium-ion battery cell.

“Today’s achievement has been produced with long hours by a committed team that continues to expand,” said Chaitanya Sharma, CEO of iM3NY. “We will keep working around the clock to achieve our production milestones.”

The current demonstration phase is focused on moving towards production grade design and serves to de-risk design unknowns involved in the transition from pilot production to full scale production.

With the manual process already underway, Magnis expects to move to a semi-automated manufacturing process in the second half of 2021, before a fully automated production process starting up in the first half of 2022.