Canada Carbon Inc. announced it has successfully completed half-cell battery testing of its graphite material with Polaris Battery Labs, LLC. Flake graphite provided for this testing was provided from Canada Carbon's Miller Graphite Mine project (Miller) located in Grenville-sur-la-Rouge, Quebec. Coin cells for Canada Carbon were assembled and tested by Polaris Battery Labs against a commercially available graphite baseline material for comparison.

Both sets of cells were assembled using a lithium metal counter electrode, Wattman glass fiber separator and 1M LiPF6 in 3:7 EC:EMC electrolyte. The coin cells were tested according to Polaris' Batch Qualification regime to determine the first cycle loss, reversible capacity, and other key electrochemical parameters. Canada Carbon's flake graphite material showed promising results in terms of capacity and first cycle loss in comparison to commercial baseline materials with ~6.5% first cycle loss and 353mAh/g reversible capacity which is above the commercial reference graphite material testing at an average 345mAh/g. Data indicates that improvements in rate performance are still needed to achieve commercial performance, however this can be attributed to flake graphite being used in comparison to commercially used CSPG (coated, spheroidized, purified graphite) which allows lithiation only on the edge plane leading to typically slower lithiation and delithiation rate capabilities.

However, improvements in performance would likely be seen with additional post processing such as spheroidization and pitch coating which are used in commercial materials.