사진 확대

K-Road Robotics, an industrial laser, robot, and factory automation company, is developing new technologies to reduce energy consumption of industrial electric furnaces in half with high-power lasers. It is developing a "laser continuous electric furnace" that replaces the existing artificial graphite batch electric furnace standard.

K-road Robotics announced on the 15th that it has signed an agreement with seven industry-academic institutions, including KAIST, Korea Institute of Machinery, UNIST, and Korea Institute of Chemical Convergence Testing, to develop a continuous electric furnace system with high efficiency to reduce artificial graphite production energy for secondary battery cathode materials.

K-Road Robotics has been selected as the lead research and development agency for the 2026 Energy Demand Management Core Technology Development Project and Energy Efficiency Innovation Technology Development Project organized by the Korea Energy Technology Evaluation Institute. The total research and development cost is 16.717 billion won (12 billion won in government contributions), and the research period is until December 2028. POSCO Future M, Korea's leading battery material company, will participate as a demand company and link demonstration and commercialization with the goal of applying a 10,000-ton mass production line in 2029.

The artificial graphite for secondary battery anode materials currently produced in Korea is produced with the "Acheson-type batch electric furnace" method developed 100 years ago. It is a method of heating the entire interior of a huge furnace (爐) to around 3000℃.

What is actually necessary for graphitization is the heating of the coke raw material itself, and as the furnace wall, insulation, and surrounding air are all heated together, a significant portion of the input power escapes to discarded heat. As a result, it takes 72 hours to heat and cool once, and consumes 12,000 kWh of power per ton. This is equivalent to the amount of electricity used by about 300 households with four people in Korea for a month.

The "laser continuous electric furnace" developed by K-road Robotics is a method of precisely selecting and heating only the necessary points of raw materials flowing on the conveyor with a high-power laser. Here, a continuous flow process that does not repeat heating and cooling is combined. Through this, the plan is to halve power consumption per ton compared to the existing batch method and more than double the production speed.

"Our technology, which heats only the parts needed with lasers, is a platform technology that can be applied not only to artificial graphite but also to high-temperature industries such as cathode materials and steel," said Shin In-seung, CEO of K-Road Robotics. "If it spreads across the domestic industrial electric furnace market, it will reduce power costs by trillions of won a year and serve as a starting point for the Korean manufacturing industry to regain global competitiveness."

K-road Robotics is an industrial robot manufacturing company established in Ulsan in 2004. It has more than 70 patents in the field of factory automation such as welding robots, high weight transfer robots, and secondary batteries.