Recently, Elkem Silicones won the 2022 R&D 100 Innovation Award of the R&D World magazine with its BLUESIL™ RT Foam series products. This award recognizes the longstanding contribution of Elkem Silicones's BLUESIL™ RT Foam product line to improving the sealing process, increasing assembly efficiency, and reducing overall costs for power cells.
Founded in 1963, the R&D 100 Innovation Award, the world's most influential innovation award, is known as the "Oscars" of the technology industry. Based on three criteria of technological breakthrough, innovative uniqueness, and practicality of application, every year, 100 outstanding technologies of great significance in the world are selected by the expert evaluation team for the award from thousands of S&T innovation technologies in the world.
The accelerated electrification of the automotive industry has brought new requirements and opportunities for materials science. As the core component of new energy vehicles, the sealing of the battery pack is crucial to the safety and stability of the battery system, affecting the safety of the CBU. In response to the market and industry pain points, Elkem Silicones launched an innovative sealing product, the BLUESIL™ RT Foam series. With the advantages of excellent compression deformability and resilience, lightweight sealing, ability to meet the requirements of UL94-V0 flame retardant grade, heat insulation, and corrosion resistance, this series of products can protect the battery pack for a long time. It is suitable for various sealing surfaces of battery packs, easy to realize industrial automation and standardization, making assembly easier and truly realizing cost reduction and efficiency increase. Compared with similar products on the market, the BLUESIL™ RT Foam series has lower density and lighter weight, which can reduce the cost of battery packs while improving the sealing performance of battery packs, realizing the lightweight of battery packs and effectively reducing carbon emissions.
Currently, the products of Elkem Silicones BLUESIL™ RT Foam series have been applied to 3 million EV worldwide, protecting their safety and effectively contributing to the vigorous development of the new energy vehicle market. In the future, Elkem Silicones, together with more partners, will make unremitting efforts to achieve a low-carbon future by continuously empowering the automotive industry with innovative material science and exploring more perfect solutions in the automotive field.