18 September/October 2025 | E-Mobility Engineering and coatings as well, to meet the advancing requirements. As the market grew, Valverde became so successful in harvesting all the information and learning what new materials would be needed to meet global demand that the company’s innovation portfolio became vast. It needed managing and she was the obvious choice to take the role, adding it to her ongoing work scouting the market for new opportunities. Developing the next generation One of the biggest influences on the work of Valverde and her team has been changes to battery architecture design. In an endeavour to deliver ever-higher energy density, better battery efficiency and extended range, designers are having to pack increasing numbers of cells into the same space – and that has led to a revolution. “There has been a change from ‘cellto-module-to-pack’ architecture to just ‘cell-to-pack’ designs, skipping the whole module approach,” explains Valverde. “Losing the intermediate metal box protection of the module has had a tremendous effect on the requirements for the adhesives that now bond the cells to the pack. “We now need to create materials that are far more structural and far easier to apply and with the added demand for faster production, a lot of the steps have to happen very quickly. Thousands of units need to be produced per day so there’s now very little time for the adhesive to build up strength, and that has definitely influenced our latest innovations.” In the EV industry, time is money and Valverde’s team is working hard to introduce new materials that can lower costs by reducing the application complexity; reducing the application time; reducing the length of curing needed before the process can move to the next step; or reducing the overall amount of material that is needed. “We want the electrification of transportation to take place and if consumers cannot afford to buy an EV, it is either never going to happen or it is going to happen very slowly,” explains Valverde. “That’s no good for anybody, but making materials cheaper is not always possible, so we try also to reduce the cost of the overall process by making things more efficient. “One good example is our EV Bond 775 hot melt reactive adhesive, which is formulated to be applied in a molten state. You melt it, apply it, and as it cools down and gets compressed between two surfaces, the molecules of the polymer have been deliberately formulated to arrange themselves in a way that immediately starts generating strength. “The ultimate performance still requires the material to fully cure, but for the manufacturing steps, we can design materials that generate enough strength to allow the next process to occur without having to wait for the full curing time. That reduction in process time can achieve big savings for the customers. “We are also working on reducing the number of adhesives required across the whole battery manufacturing process. To do that, we are developing the robustness of materials so they can bond to multiple substrates and under multiple geometries, and that is another one of our main focuses at the moment. “We cannot claim we invented all these new approaches; they are often just chemistry tricks you learn at school and are already in use for other applications, but we connect the dots and make them work at a commercial scale for the EV industry. That’s achieved through lots and lots of formulations and r&d by an extremely talented team of experts.” Into the future Global electrification is not solely consigned to EVs, so neither is the work of Valverde’s team. The company is supporting companies that are developing space rockets, satellites, submarines and weather buoys, among many other applications, and the criteria for the bonding performance and surface materials involved are similar for all. “There are slight differences, but for the most part I would say 90% of the requirements are the same,” says Valverde. “Just that last 10% may change from application to application In conversation | Marlen Valverde Valverde’s team work on a wide range of applications, including thermal management, bonding, sealing and encapsulation technologies
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