As increasing markets for Lithium‒ion battery (LiB), several environmental issues have attained great attention. Especially, the organic solvent N‒Methyl‒2‒Pyrrolidone (NMP), commonly used in the traditional slurry casting process for fabricating LiB electrodes, will be about to be regulated due to its toxicity and the environmental concerns. Therefore, the production of LiB electrodes by a dry process without using NMP organic solvents is of special interest nowadays. In the dry process, it is generally accepted that 1‒dimensional carbon materials like carbon nanotubes (CNT) are beneficial than conventional carbon conductor such as carbon blacks (CB). However, CB is inevitably included during the CNT production, simultaneously as an impurity. Refining CNT from CNT/CB mixture can cause another cost obviously. On the other hand, there have been limited information to study dispersion of carbon materials in electrode with respect to dispersion method and types of carbon conductor. Here, we systematically test the effect of dispersibility of carbon conductor in electrode according to dispersion method and type of carbon conductors. In addition, effect of CB amount in carbon conductor are also elucidated on manufacturing procedure, properties of electrode and their electrochemical performances.

Lithium-ion battery (LiB) is one of the special issues on nowadays and diverse researches to develop LiB with better performances have been carried out so far, especially, regarding improved properties of each component such as cathode, anode, separator and electrolyte. However, there are limited information on ‘processing’ to prepare each component, and especially fabrication of cathode is strongly dependent on thinky mixer to realize homogeneous dispersion of active materials and conductors in binders. Herein, we report on preparation of LiNi0.8Co0.1Mn0.1O2 (NCM811) based cathode materials with different carbon conductors (CNT and carbon black) using homogenizer and three-roll milling method. These processes are turned out perfect alternative to prepare cathode electrode. LiB cells were assembled using the dispersed electrode slurry and the performance of a cell was electrochemically stable, even in the case of a CNT conductor, which is normally difficult to make perfect dispersion because of its strong Van der Waals attraction between the tubes and π–π interactions.