A dry room is a specialized manufacturing or laboratory environment where the humidity is kept extremely low (often with dew points far below 0°C, meaning very few water molecules in the air). Lithium-ion battery production requires dry rooms because certain materials like lithium-containing electrodes and electrolyte react with moisture. In practice, components like the electrolyte or the cell assembly process like inserting electrolyte into cells are done in dry rooms to ensure consistent performance of the cells and to avoid corrosion of the manufacturing equipment. Working in a dry room prevents the introduction of moisture that could later lead to issues like increased self-discharge or gas generation within the sealed cell.
NOVONIX’s facilities include state-of-the-art dry rooms for assembling cells. This ensures that when NOVONIX is fabricating prototype cells or preparing materials for analysis, water contamination is minimized. By controlling humidity, NOVONIX can obtain more consistent and reliable performance data, as variations due to moisture are eliminated. Additionally, NOVONIX evaluates how sensitive certain new materials are to moisture by intentionally testing them in different humidity levels, thereby informing what conditions are necessary during manufacturing. The use of dry rooms reflects NOVONIX’s commitment to replicating industry-standard production environments, so that the results of their R&D are directly translatable to real-world battery manufacturing.
