Europe´s decision to become climate neutral by 2050 has had an impact on the transport sector through a ban on internal combustion engines from 2035. As a result, expectations of a significant rise in demand for lithium-ion batteries led to plans for gigafactories all across Europe. Laser processing of separator material and other process steps in battery manufacturing cause emissions of health-hazardous contaminants (aromatic compounds, aldehydes, alkenes, halogenated compounds and alkanes), which are also harmful for the product.

Due to competition from Chinese battery manufactures, cost pressure is high and an energy-efficient filtration process is required, that prevents interaction between electrolyte and pollutant as well as mechanical damage of separator foil. As part of a collaborative project between B&S Filtration and ILK Dresden, the intended technological development is a multi-stage filtration process capable of removing corrosive, acid gases (HF, HCl) as well as organic compounds, even at trace concentrations. Its modular design allows for the separation of both current and future pollutants, and certain components are designed to be regenerable.

B&S Filtration is responsible for the development of the filtration process and the filter element, which includes a pre-separator and a pollutant specific multi-layer main adsorption module. The technical evaluation of the filter elements is in the responsibility of the ILK. In this context, a dosing device is implemented to enable a long-term stable generation of multi-component mixtures of model pollutants. The qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the filter elements is carried out using a sequential sampling procedure. Results of the investigations will be presented in more detail in the lecture.