With EV adoption accelerating and expectations for battery performance climbing, the pressure is on manufacturers to find cheaper, faster, cleaner, and more efficient ways to produce batteries. In response, a new approach is gaining traction, one that wants to reshape how electrodes are made and how battery production evolves. Dry coating is quickly emerging as one of the most promising innovations in this space, offering a potential leap forward in reducing costs while simultaneously simplifying production and cutting emissions.
The Ins and Outs of Dry Coating
In a dry-coating line, active materials are handled as solid powders instead of slurries. A dry mix of cathode or anode particles, conductive additive, and a polymer binder is formed into a thin film and then pressed onto the metal foil. In this case, no toxic solvents are needed. Under pressure and mild heat, the binder fibrillates and binds the particles together. A lamination process follows, where the active particles layer is applied onto the primed foil. The result is a solid electrode film without ever passing through a conventional oven. In practice, this means dramatically simpler coating lines: plants no longer need massive drying ovens or solvent-recovery units, cutting capital costs and floor space. Since the electrodes start out nearly dry, curing time is negligible, enabling continuous, higher-throughput coating. However, the process is not without technical hurdles. Key challenges currently include optimizing powder properties, ensuring uniform pressure and temperature across the coating roller, and developing robust process controls in the absence of a finalized industry standard.
The Key Benefits of Dry Coating
Dry electrode coating is reshaping battery manufacturing by delivering important cost savings, while also reducing space requirements and improving scalability, sustainability, and performance.
Cost and Energy Savings
One of the most significant advantages of dry coating lies in reducing production costs and energy consumption. By eliminating the drying step entirely, manufacturers can lower operating costs by over 50% and cut energy usage by 40%-75%. They can also bring down the initial capital investment by around 30%, thanks to the removal of huge ovens and complex solvent recovery systems. These cost savings make dry coating an attractive option for companies looking to scale up production more affordably.
Simplified Manufacturing
Dry coating simplifies manufacturing in ways that benefit both operations and the environment. By eliminating toxic solvents and the regulatory burden that comes with them, this reduces factory complexity and enables cleaner, safer working conditions. With no slurry mixing, chemical distillation, or drying involved, production lines become shorter and more streamlined. The result is a smaller factory footprint, lower labor costs, and greater flexibility in line design. This technology also allows for faster processing times, increasing throughput and helping manufacturers meet growing demand more efficiently.
Increased Sustainability
In terms of sustainability, dry coating offers major environmental benefits. A significant portion of energy in traditional battery plants goes toward heating ovens and recovering solvents. By eliminating these steps, dry lines substantially reduce energy consumption and the associated carbon emissions. The absence of solvents also means no volatile organic compound emissions during the coating process. Combined, these changes make dry electrode coating a much cleaner and more environmentally responsible method of battery production.
Enhanced Battery Performance
In addition to operational and environmental benefits, dry electrode coating can improve battery performance. The process enables thicker electrodes with greater mechanical stability, allowing more active material to be packed into each cell, resulting in higher energy density. The uniform particle distribution achieved through dry methods can also enhance cycle life and support faster charging and discharging.
Industry Trends and Adoption
The push to scale dry-electrode manufacturing has accelerated in 2025 with major equipment suppliers and cell makers piloting lines worldwide. Similarly, partnerships are forming to commercialize dry processes, underscoring how the industry is moving toward solvent-free fabrication. Initial deployments are focused primarily on NMC chemistries, where the potential for cost and energy savings is greatest. The race to perfect dry coating for NMC cathodes is especially intense; whoever achieves stable, high-throughput production first has the potential to unlock a major cost and performance advantage. Matthews Engineering, a division of Matthews International, has been a pioneer in this area since developing the world’s first large‑scale dry‑electrode line in 2012 and continues to engineer high‑precision powder‑to‑film coating systems for dry battery electrode production.
Similarly, global battery and automaker roadmaps reflect dry coating. Several EV battery producers have publicly targeted dry-electrode production in the mid-to late-2020s, aiming for the lower costs and faster cycles of production it promises. Although challenges remain, investments and announcements in dry-coating projects still surged in 2025, often supported by government grants or joint ventures. As a result, major OEMs are actively piloting dry-coating lines as they recognize that once dry coating reaches stable mass production, the resulting cost and performance gap will be too large to ignore. Failing to adopt the technology could mean losing competitive viability altogether.
Taking Dry Coating to the Next Level with Addionics
As dry electrode coating continues to gain momentum in 2025, battery manufacturers are increasingly looking for solutions that simplify production and enhance performance. While the technology promises lower costs, faster throughput, and a smaller environmental footprint, its success rests on more than just removing solvents. To unlock dry coating’s full value, the industry needs compatible electrode architectures that ensure strong adhesion, mechanical stability, and efficient ion and electron transport.
Dry coating is here to stay, with advantages too significant to ignore, ensuring its future lies not in abandonment but in continuous improvement and industrialization. Addionics 3D Current Collectors are uniquely suited to support and accelerate the adoption of this technology. Their porous structure enables higher active material loading and solves the critical challenge of adhesion at scale, without the need for primers or additives. By embedding the active material within the porous structure of the current collector itself, Addionics enables a uniform electrode without relying on primers or additives. The result is a stronger, more stable interface that improves performance while remaining fully compatible with high-throughput dry processes.
Addionics’ solution is chemistry-agnostic and a drop-in solution, making it ideal for both current dry-coating NMC production lines and others including LFP and solid-state batteries. As the battery industry looks to scale up dry coating at speed and at scale, Addionics can bridge the gap between innovation and industrialization.
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