Team 8: Automation,
Optimization, and Scale-up of
EMD production Process
Sponsored by: Duracell
Sponsor Advisor: Michael Pozin
Faculty Advisor: Dr. William Mustain
From Left to Right: Joshua Woodruff, Nehal
Lakdawala, Steven Rodriguez, Adam Medina
The goals of this capstone design are to: 1) understand how specific variables of the EMD production process
influences the purity of the final product; and 2) design a state-of-the-art industrial-scale EMD manufacturing
process that minimizes the number of plant workers through automation. This new facility will produce higher
quality EMD while significantly reducing the burden of this typically labor-intensive production process. As proofof-concept we have implemented a fully automated bench-scale reactor in order to show the effectiveness of
the new plant design.
To achieve these design goals, our team has performed a wide array of computational & experimental work.
Experimentally, many different combinations of current density, acidity, and manganese content have been
tested to find optimal conditions under which to make EMD. The results of these experiments, allowed for the
optimal process control of our bench-scale reactor. The group has also spent a considerable amount of time on
plant design, optimization and automation processes. These improvements to the overall process, will allow for
higher quality EMD to be produced, resulting in significantly improved batteries.
Figure 1: Automated bench
scale reactor to create
electrolytic manganese dioxide
Figure 2: Electrode plated
with EMD at higher purity
Figure 3: Post process
experimental EMD
CHEMICAL & BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING
Alkaline batteries are one of the world’s most popular and effective forms of energy storage. These batteries
consist of a zinc anode and electrolytic manganese dioxide (EMD) cathode. Since the size and shape of alkaline
batteries cannot change, internal improvements are crucial to producing higher capacity batteries. Our project
focuses on improvements to the production and characterization of the EMD cathode. Currently, EMD contains
impurities that are embedded during its production process; these impurities lower the achievable amount of
energy and shelf life of the battery. Thus, our project aims to characterize impurities and determine the optimal
conditions for EMD production.