Litona, a start-up founded at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, wants to produce materials for sodium-ion batteries on an industrial scale. Especially "Prussian white".
Litona founder Sebastian Büchele shows a bottle of the energy storage material Prussian white for sodium-ion batteries.
Markus Breig, KIT
Prussian white is a "chemical relative" of the well-known Prussian blue dye. It is essentially based on sodium, iron and manganese and can be used as an energy storage material at the cathode, i.e. the positive pole of a sodium-ion battery. The European industry is faced with the problem of a lack of the necessary energy storage materials for the production of sodium-ion batteries: "At the moment, even research institutions have considerable difficulties in purchasing sufficient quantities of Prussian White. There are hardly any producers in Europe", says Sebastian Büchele from KIT’s Institute for Applied Materials, who founded Litona. This "significantly impairs" research and transfer of sodium-ion technology.
Sebastian Büchele founded the start-up Litona together with chemist Tom Bötticher to remedy the situation. While working on the synthesis of Prussian white, an innovative production process was developed at KIT in addition to the high-quality cathode material. "Our competitors had problems in scaling the production of Prussian White analogs", says Büchele. “We think that we have solved these problems. Moreover, we have developed methods to further improve our material”. Litona uses the KIT infrastructure and is already working on setting up its own production.
This is a partly automated translation of this German article.