A Chat with Dr Jennifer Channell, Head of Commercial at Anaphite on Why Dry Coating Will Transform Battery Manufacturing

Tell us about Anaphite

We’re a process technology company based in Bristol, working with some of the world’s largest vehicle and battery cell manufacturers. We’re tackling two of the biggest challenges in electric vehicle (EV) battery manufacturing – the high cost and carbon dioxide emissions of electrode manufacturing.

Our focus is on dry electrode coating – a production method that consumes significantly less energy and cuts CO2 emissions compared to the wet coating process used in battery manufacturing today. The industry desperately needs manufacturing innovations that can slash both costs and carbon footprint – and that’s exactly the gap we’re filling.
How did you come to join the company?

I joined Anaphite in July 2023, having worked with the company in my previous role as Innovation Lead for Batteries with the Faraday Battery Challenge at Innovate UK. I supported a grant funded project called GRAVITY during which Anaphite demonstrated the use of the core IP to improve the performance of electrodes manufactured using wet coating and explore early demonstration of its application in dry coating. The Founders, Sam and Alex, had such drive and passion – it was infectious working with them. I wanted to be part of a close-knit team that was working hard to transform the battery industry. It was an opportunity I couldn’t refuse!

Tell us about your core product or service

We’re enabling the battery industry to shift from traditional wet coating to dry coating. The process relies on wet slurry coating using toxic solvents, that need to be evaporated. This requires huge ovens, up to 100m long, that use megawatts of power. It’s costly, energy intensive and produces tonnes of carbon dioxide.

With our suite of proprietary chemical compositing techniques, Anaphite combines all the key ingredients of a battery electrode into a single engineered material, optimised for high-speed dry-coating lines. We call this Dry Coating Precursor, or DCP ®. It’s a dry powder that forms a film under shear forces, so can be laminated directly onto a current collector. The result? No drying ovens are needed to manufacture electrodes.

Switching from wet coating to Anaphite’s technology can reduce energy consumption by over 70% and cell production costs by 20-25%.

What most excites you about the dry coating industry?

What excites me most is that our technology is not just playing a role in meeting net-zero targets but also significantly reducing cost. It’s rare to see a new technology be both greener and cheaper! For EVs in particular, delivering cheaper batteries without sacrificing performance is critical if they’re to compete on price with combustion engine vehicles.

Wet coating has been continuously evolved over decades and is reaching the limits of its development potential, so it’s not the solution. We believe our dry coating is the answer and will transform the battery industry.

What has been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome along the way?

The biggest challenge so far has been balancing all the properties our powders need to have to hit cost, performance and sustainability targets for customers, while producing high-quality electrodes at high yields.

It all comes down to mixing, and our unique approach solves many of the challenges that arise when you try to combine complex materials with different properties into a homogenous dry powder. It lets us work with different additives, binders and active materials, and we can engineer the powder particles to optimise their properties, like flowability, specifically for dry coating. Because of the flexibility of our process and our expert know-how, we can quickly adapt to meet the specific requirements of each customer.

What is your number one piece of advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Focus is critical. That may sound obvious, there’s always a temptation to explore multiple applications or pivot into adjacent markets. Early-stage exploration is valuable, but we’ve learned that our most meaningful breakthroughs came when we committed fully to mastering one significant problem.

For us, that meant concentrating entirely on dry coating. From the moment we made that decision, it strengthened our technology roadmap, our commercial strategy, our partnerships – all of it.

Pick the one problem you’re uniquely positioned to solve, then go all in. That’s where the real breakthroughs happen.

What can we hope to see from Anaphite in the future?

Right now, we’re focused on scaling up production at our Bristol facility – really putting our manufacturing processes through their paces to prove they work at commercial scale as well as they do in the lab.

Looking ahead, we’re collaborating with partners to hit our first full-scale deployment by 2028. Initially, we’ll be concentrating on the markets where we see the strongest demand – primarily across Europe, South Korea, and North America.

We’re also expanding our DCP ® technology platform to work with emerging battery technologies, like solid state, and applying our dry coating expertise to LFP chemistries to further drive down battery cell costs. We’re exploring potential applications in stationary energy storage systems and consumer electronics, but EVs remain our primary focus because that’s where the demand is greatest.