Development of Innovative Test Bed Fixture in Measuring Air Cathode Membrane Film Thickness

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e-Zinc's technology is a paradigm shift in energy storage. Located in Toronto, Canada, e-Zinc has developed a breakthrough electrochemical technology for storing energy in zinc metal. The company is looking to continue this work by scaling up the manufacturing of a best-in-class electrode for its novel zinc-air battery. Lambton College and e-Zinc have successfully automated the data collection of the conductivity measurements, building a data acquisition unit that automatically takes sample measurements once a sample is manually loaded in the fixture and outputting it into an easily processable format. However, the current method requires time to load the sample, ensuring the fixture applies even pressure across the sample surface. e-Zinc is interested in collaborating with Lambton College to uncover a solution to this issue and design a test bed fixture to measure air cathode membrane film thickness. Unfortunately, there is currently no off-the-shelf solution for this problem; thus, continued research, prototyping, and testing are needed. The next phase of this collaborative research is essential to deploying the e-Zinc Air Cathode Pilot Line in late 2023. The results from this project will provide e-Zinc with an improved process and add additional capabilities to e-Zinc's quality control program for air cathode production, further enhancing the electrode's quality control. It is anticipated that the results from this project will lead to the creation of full-time employment positions as e-Zinc will be able to establish a full-scale operation. Finally, e-Zinc's energy storage solution will provide significant environmental benefits, such as lowering fossil fuel consumption and significantly reducing GHG emissions.