Building the Next Link in North Carolina's Battery Supply Chain
By Michelle Fiscus, Senior VP & Chief Communications Officer
When Dr. Hemali Rathnayake looks at the future of battery manufacturing, she doesn't see a single breakthrough.
She sees a series of bottlenecks waiting to be solved.
Every lithium-ion battery depends on cathode materials. But manufacturing those materials requires enormous amounts of water, hazardous chemicals, and tightly controlled production processes that make scaling domestic battery manufacturing both expensive and difficult.
Rathnayake believes there is a better way.
A professor at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering at UNC Greensboro, and co-founder and chief scientific advisor of Minerva Lithium, Rathnayake has spent her career developing technologies that strengthen the domestic battery supply chain. An earlier NCInnovation award helped advance her lithium-refining technology toward commercialization through Minerva Lithium. Now, with support from a second NCInnovation award, she's tackling another critical challenge: developing a cleaner, more efficient process for manufacturing the cathode materials that power lithium-ion batteries.
Traditional manufacturing of cathode materials—the part of a battery that stores and releases energy—requires enormous amounts of water and hazardous chemicals. Producing just one metric ton of cathode material can consume roughly 32,000 gallons of freshwater while relying on chemicals such as ammonia and sodium hydroxide to maintain quality. Those requirements increase costs, create permitting challenges, and introduce manufacturing variability that slows domestic production.
"The primary bottleneck is the extreme resource intensity and process sensitivity of the traditional hydroxide co-precipitation process," Rathnayake said. "This high dependence makes the entire supply chain highly vulnerable to process fluctuations, leading to composition inhomogeneity, frequent batch variability, low manufacturing yields, and extensive wastewater permitting hurdles that slow down capacity expansion."
Her team has developed a manufacturing process that cuts freshwater use by 50 percent while also reducing ammonia and sodium hydroxide consumption by half. The process also produces more consistent battery materials, helping manufacturers improve quality while reducing waste.
"Our technology uniquely delivers a simultaneous step-change across all these metrics," Rathnayake said. "The main technical advantages include a 50% reduction in freshwater usage and a 50% reduction in ammonia and sodium hydroxide consumption."
The project also supports a more circular battery economy by recovering valuable materials from used batteries and putting them back into the manufacturing process. Rathnayake's team is working to use "black mass"—the powder recovered from spent lithium-ion batteries—as a raw material for manufacturing new cathode materials.
"Black mass is the recycled powder from spent batteries and will serve as the major feedstock for direct production of cathode powder, mitigating the reliance on virgin materials," Rathnayake said.
The science has already been proven in the laboratory. The next challenge is demonstrating that the process can work consistently in a manufacturing environment.
"The technology must demonstrate reproducibility at pilot scale with consistent quality," Rathnayake said. "Customers require validated performance, quality control and economic viability."
NCInnovation funding will help the team move from laboratory production to pilot-scale manufacturing, generating the data battery manufacturers need before testing new materials in their own production lines. The goal is to produce battery materials that manufacturers can evaluate, test, and ultimately use without changing the way they already build batteries.
"Customer validation supported by pilot-scale manufacturing data is the key inflection point," Rathnayake said. "This milestone confirms both technical and commercial feasibility."
Without that next phase of development, promising university research can remain in the laboratory instead of becoming a product manufacturers can use.
"Without NCI funding, this technology will not become a commercially viable product," Rathnayake said.
If successful, the project could help manufacturers reduce the water, chemicals, and environmental impacts associated with producing cathode materials while strengthening domestic battery manufacturing.
"This technology can strengthen North Carolina's growing battery and advanced manufacturing sectors, which support domestic supply-chain development and workforce growth," Rathnayake said.