Reactor agitates/mixes UPW (ultra pure water) as inputs are titrated in (LiOH powder, CoSO4 powder, dopants, other secret sauces). Once the necessary reactions, concentrations and uniformity are correct, you have a water-based slurry. The water, which was used as a medium in which to suspend and combine the inputs, has done its job and needs to be removed to leave only the mixed powder. While dehydrating, there are a number of things you don’t want to happen. For example, caking, in which case you end up with dried clumps of powder. Or stratification/separation, in which case the suspended inputs will drift up or down based on chemical properties, compromising the uniformity gained in the reactor. Or undesired chemical reactions, perhaps from exposure to oxygen, excess heat, UV radiation, etc. These are all things that might happen if the slurry was simply made to sit in a furnace or air-dry. So you want to keep this slurry moving, in a controlled environment, and convert it to a dehydrated mix with the same uniformity.
Enter the spray dryer. The slurry gets pumped to a spray dryer. A spray dryer atomizes (a very crude analogy is the “mist” setting on your garden hose nozzle) this slurry into a chamber that has a heated drying gas (not necessarily air, perhaps inert nitrogen) blowing through it. The small atomized particles of slurry rapidly dehydrate as the tiny bit of water in each tiny particle evaporates. Analogy: a desert rain on a hot, dry day that evaporates before hitting the ground (if you’ve ever witnessed this phenomenon), leaving only the dust particles that seeded the rain drops.
The dehydrated particles are so small and light (like a fine dust floating in barn) that the flow of the dehydrating air easily carries them out of the chamber and into a collector.
The powder can then be fired in the furnace, whereby the high heat combined with time (input energy) induces a chemical change throughout the material: crystal structures forming in the powder. Another crude analogy here would be making ceramic dishes or clay pots. Firing a clay pot in a kiln makes the clay powder engage with itself in various structures, often crystalline, so that once the water all evaporates away, you are left with a freestanding structured material. If Nano One’s battery material slurry were made in a thick enough consistency to shape into pots, you could possibly fire it and make LMNO ceramic pots!
In any case, the spray dryer allows dehydration to be, by design and necessity, a very rapid process; quite opposed to the firing process, which is still chemically necessary for reasons Griff just mentioned and described above. So the spray dryer (even if it does run at the correct temp) doesn’t imbue enough energy (time) to cause the chemical structure change - only enough to evaporate water.
As we all know, firing can happen quicker with Nano’s process, since the mix is so uniform. The inputs are all more or less where they need to be, so the atoms only have to migrate very short distances to grow the grains of crystal. You also don’t need multiple firing cycles with micronizing (milling/grinding) in between, thanks to the uniformly mixed powder, since there are no “big” clumps of cobalt or nickel, too far away from other elements to grow crystal with, that need to be reground for another go in the furnace.
Caveat: there may be intermediate steps I haven’t described; I haven’t walked the plant or seen prints. The patent literature is very informative and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants a better understanding of the process.
Switching gears, you’ll note that the old NNO website advertises other applications of the process… pharmaceuticals, superconductors, etc. Many industries, technologies and processes depend on the ability to finely mix and react various ingredients in specific concentrations, uniformity and particle size. This includes current/existing applications with lower specification thresholds (i.e. pharmaceuticals, ag-chem/fertilizers) that would be afforded competitive advantage through lower process cost, higher product quality, and less waste. It also includes applications with a much stricter specifications that are not commercially viable (since current high-spec methods (for example, chemical vapor deposition/CVD) are very high cost, low volume) but would enabled by Nano One’s process.
This was what really blew me away when I was investigating Nano One as an investment. The process they hold WILL one day be de-facto in dozens of industries, from textiles to super alloys, engineered materials, pharmaceuticals, etc. We will rely on dozens of products manufactured with materials created by it every day. There is really no viable competition here waiting in the wings, no less competition that exists proven at commercial-scale in a commercial application like Nano , and it may stay that way for decades, until someone cracks quasi-molecular assembly at a speed and scale that would make it cost-competitive at the nano-scale (which may be physically impossible.)
I think the first commercial application of Nano One’s process has been very fortuitous, and the choice to only focus on one (and market one) to begin with was very wise, both operationally and financially. No twitter or marketing hyperbole on applications they are a year away from exploring and pouring R&D/patent money into, before they even have a win in cathode… just a full, clear focus on getting commercial validation in the initial application. I haven’t engaged with Nano where they plan to take the process next - a question I will save for when they finally turn one of those many NDA’s into revenue and “make a deal” in cathode. Or perhaps a chemical multinational like BASF or duPont, vertically integrated throughout many of the processes potential applications, will obviate the question through a buyout, and proliferate the process to internal applications? We shall see! But in summary - the value is immense. More immense than even the most with “skin in the game” realize. The attributable market cap to just one mid-size cathode plant license, based on Blondal’s #'s, in the context of what I’ve just discussed, is incredible.
For further reading to really understand the space Nano occupies as a process (and not just the space it occupies in cathode mfg) I recommend learning about the following processes and their scope/limitations: (nano-) milling; various deposition processes; condensation processes; vaporization processes; sol-gel processes. And then various tacks at molecular-scale assembly, noting the maturity and scale of that research. This will give you a grounding to understand where Nano’s process fits in, and just what a monster it is.