World’s first agile battery cell production opens
World’s first agile battery cell production opens, source In order to be able to produce battery cells – for example for electromobility or power tools – more flexibly in the future, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have set up an agile battery cell production facility. Based on highly flexible robot-based automation, they have achieved a level of flexibility that was previously only possible in manual cell production. This enables companies to adapt more quickly to new technologies and volatile markets and can strengthen Germany’s competitiveness as an industrial location. The federal and state governments funded the development with a total of almost 19 million euros.
According to the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, battery cells are becoming increasingly important as versatile and efficient energy storage devices. For example, they are the driving force behind the progressive electrification of mobility. For manufacturing companies, this key technology is of high strategic and economic relevance. Currently, demand is mainly met by cost-driven mass production in Asia and North America, which also has an impact on mechanical and plant engineering.
Professor Jürgen Fleischer, head of the wbk Institute for Production Technology at KIT, says:
In Germany, we do not have the prerequisites to be competitive in the purely cost-driven mass production of cells and the associated mechanical engineering,
“The opening of the world’s first agile battery cell production in the Karlsruhe research factory shows how we can differentiate ourselves from the global market with highly flexible and resource-efficient production and specifically address the high-margin premium segment and niche markets.”
Flexible and resource-efficient battery cell production
For battery cell production, KIT researchers developed special robot cells together with the company Exyte.
Fleischer, says:
These are a world first in this field. They serve as local drying rooms, also known as microenvironments, to protect the moisture-sensitive battery materials,
Compared to conventional drying rooms, the volume of space to be dehumidified is significantly smaller. This technology therefore offers a particularly high energy saving potential. Four such microenvironments and their associated process modules represent the physical structure of the agile battery cell production in the wbk research factory in Karlsruhe.
In addition, the project participants built a “digital twin”, i.e. a virtual image of the production system. This allows the scientists to use software to investigate economies of scale by multiplying individual microenvironments and to determine production-related variables such as the optimal batch size. This simulation can also be used for production planning for agile battery cell production. The real system is connected to a database so that all processes can be adapted and improved using AI in the future.
Close cooperation between science and industry
The scientists in the AgiloBat research project developed battery cell production together with medium-sized machine and plant manufacturers. This will enable them to jointly offer competitive plant technology along the entire process chain. The process knowledge contributed by KIT for more flexible and modular plant technology will also enable the companies involved to produce battery cells in a sustainable, flexible, resource-efficient and automated manner in the future, as well as to test new material systems through industrial-scale production with small quantities of material. The infrastructure developed complements the research infrastructure in the field of battery cell production that has been built up at KIT since 2011.
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World’s first agile battery cell production opens, source
