Unifrax, a manufacturer of high-performance specialty materials, introduced its Battery Advisory Board, which will meet regularly to provide strategic guidance as Unifrax grows its battery portfolio and enters the silicon anode market with its new SiFAB Silicon Fiber Anode Battery Technology. (Earlier post.)

SiFAB, a scalable proprietary silicon anode battery technology demonstrated in a number of applications, including electric vehicles, power tools, smartphones, personal computers, medical devices and aviation, can deliver up to a 20% increase in gravimetric energy density in lithium-ion batteries versus cells using a graphite anode. It has shown in advanced testing a high reversible capacity of greater than 1,000 mAh/g.

Unifrax recently broke ground on its first production line located in New Carlisle, IN, which is expected to come online in early 2022.

The SiFAB technology becomes part of a Unifrax battery portfolio that also consists of thermal management products and separator media.

Unifrax’s Battery Advisory Board will include:

• Dr. Prabhakar Patil, former CEO, LG Chem Power, and Chief Engineer of Hybrid Technologies, Ford Motor Company. Dr. Patil previously served as CEO of LG Chem Power (LGCPI) for 10 years. Prior to joining LGCPI in 2005, Dr. Patil spent 27 years of his professional career at Ford Motor Company in various engineering and management positions. He served as Chief Engineer for Ford’s hybrid technologies during 2003 and was also Chief Engineer for the Ford Escape Hybrid from 1998 to 2003.

• Rita Lane, former Vice President of Operations, Apple Inc., and Senior Vice President of Integrated Supply Chain, Motorola. Ms. Lane has more than 30 years of experience building and leading global hardware operations and supply chain teams for Fortune 100 companies. From 2008 until her retirement in 2014, she served as Vice President of Operations at Apple, where she oversaw the launch of the iPad and manufacturing of the Mac desktop and accessories product lines. From 2006 to 2008, Lane was Chief Procurement Officer and SVP, Supply Chain, at Motorola. Prior to working at Motorola, Lane held various senior-level operations roles at IBM for more than 10 years.

• Dr. Arumugam “Ram” Manthiram, Professor, University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Manthiram is Director of the Texas Materials Institute and the Materials Science and Engineering Graduate Program. With more than 35 years of experience, Dr. Manthiram’s research is focused on the development of low-cost, high-performance materials for batteries. He is a globally recognized leader in cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. He has authored more than 850 journal articles. Dr. Manthiram holds the Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering #5. He delivered the lecture on behalf of Nobel Prize recipient John B. Goodenough in 2019 in Stockholm for his work on lithium-ion batteries.

• Dr. Jennifer Rupp, Professor of Electrochemical Materials, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and TU Munich (TUM). Dr. Rupp is Associate Professor of Electrochemical Materials in the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and in the Department of Chemistry at TUM, and technical director of TUM Int. Energy. Dr. Rupp gave keynote lectures at Nature Energy and Sustainability conferences, Gordon Research keynote lectures in ceramics and electrochemistry and at the Royal Chemical Society, and presented on battery, information and energy technology at the World Economic Forum. Dr. Rupp’s team’s current research focuses are on solid-state material design and tuning of structure-property relations for novel energy and information devices and operation schemes. In 2021, Rupp was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC).