GREY:ABGPF - Post by User
Post by
TheLongOne12345on Mar 21, 2016 5:32pm
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Post# 24685372
Purity
PurityMo1975, Alabamas Sept 29th PR says:
"Graphite concentrates of 99.99% Cg purity were achieved using a conventional low-temperature thermal purification process" (LTTPP)
Now, that PR was done on bench scale which doesn't mean as much as the results from our pilot plant that were put out more recently, the pilot plant is more of a "real world" scenario and they are currently turning the material from that into CSPG.
The Pilot Plant PR from Feb 3rd results are after floatation but before the LTTPP:
"The AGC pilot plant was able to produce a high carbon grade, averaging 96.7% across all flake sizes"
It is important to note for the above that it is very significant to get that purity across all flake sizes, and they could get it better but why bother when reaching higher purity means more losses and the other steps they do after probably take care of the impurities with less losses and damage to the flakes. In contrast many of the hard rock graphite miners have to extensively crush and grind their graphite so that they end up with 20% that is fine flakes and in the 80's%Cg range making it worthless, Alabamas processes avoid this.
If you are using %Cg after floatation as part of your DD make sure that you realize that you can play around with graphite on a bench scale and end up with good results but that doesnt always transfer over to the pilot plant or real world once you are in operation. What you should look at is what end goal and what processes can reasonable get there in the real world, the processes will be different and have different purities at each step depending on the graphite you use, don't get too caught up in the hype over purity at some intermediate stage, what matters is reaching the end goal, whatever that is for your company. Also, just reaching high purity is not good enough, what the impurities are can significantly impact the performance of your batteries. Alabama's Jan 19th PR talks about how well the batteries performed, they were made with their 99.95%Cg CSPG and it goes over lot of real important performance characteristics.