IN Brief:
- UKBIC has opened a Flexible Pilot Line designed to bridge laboratory battery development and industrial-scale manufacture.
- The line supports multiple solvents, chemistries, and cell formats across mixing, coating, drying, calendering, slitting, and dry-lab work.
- The facility is intended to help developers validate processes before transfer to larger production lines.
The UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) has opened its new Flexible Pilot Line in Coventry, adding a pilot-scale step between laboratory battery research and full industrial manufacture at a point when developers need something more practical than lab demonstrators, but less capital-intensive than a production line.
The facility is intended to support rapid process development, feasibility trials, and early-stage manufacturing, giving battery companies a route to prove electrode and cell processes under more representative conditions before moving to larger-scale industrialisation. Chris McDonald MP, minister for industry, said the line would help UK innovators bring advanced battery technologies to market faster by lowering cost and risk at a critical stage in development.
Its significance lies in the line’s flexibility. UKBIC said it can accommodate multiple solvents, chemistries, and cell formats, and adds smaller-scale capability across mixing, coating, drying, calendering, slitting, and dry-lab cell assembly. That makes it better suited to early optimisation work, where developers are still refining slurry behaviour, coating conditions, material handling, and format choices rather than running near-production volumes.
Sean Gilgunn, managing director at UKBIC, described the facility as “the missing piece in the jigsaw” for the UK battery ecosystem, positioning it between laboratory validation and UKBIC’s Industrial Scale-up Line. The wider backdrop is a renewed push to build domestic battery capability through the Battery Innovation Programme, and more details on the new capability are available on UKBIC’s Flexible Pilot Line page.
