Digitalization is the key to keeping up with the massive growth rate of the battery industry—not to mention the steep competition.
Siemens has submitted this article. Written by Puneet Sinha, Senior Director, Battery Industry for Siemens Digital Industries Software.
Electrification is a trend across nearly every industry today, with transportation, energy and manufacturing being some of the most important sectors to embrace it as they try to reach global sustainability targets. This shift has led to massive growth in the battery industry. While it already supplies many millions of units for personal electronics and electric vehicles, the industry is forecast to grow tenfold by the end of the decade as more cars become all electric and energy utilities rely on grid storage systems to smooth out the production curves of solar and wind generation.
This growth is also creating an all-new pool of competition in the market between start-ups, joint ventures and incumbents to find the next market leaders. Regardless of whether they are new to the game or veterans of the industry, all of these players face many of the same challenges to reduce scale-up time, cut scrap rates and increase throughput while retaining a profitable, sustainable and quality product.
To overcome the challenges of this new reality, many are moving beyond traditional solutions to a digital enterprise framework for their manufacturing. Instead of relying on disconnected silos of information, companies are leveraging the digital twin of production, alongside automation technologies and Industrial IoT, to virtually design and optimize their products and processes before ever implementing the expensive changes on the factory floor.
Modeling the production lines and validating the production processes virtually removes risks from investments and shortens the time to scale innovative processes. This digital framework, which connects automation hardware and software through Industrial IoT, enables end-to-end production integration. It delivers executable data to scale production and continuously improves throughput, all while balancing long-term profitability and sustainability.
Scaling faster with virtual development
Examples from the last few years have shown that it can take seven years or more for companies to go from gigafactory announcements to achieving stable production at scale. This long time to scale up production is a big challenge in the rapidly changing battery market. The goal of virtual development of manufacturing is to accelerate the design, construction and layout of your plant with connected, multi-disciplinary engineering.
From there businesses can create a reliable virtual version of their processes, lines and plants to commission production processes iteratively without the cost and risk of doing so in the real world. Additionally, leveraging simulations, cell engineering and optimization can be accelerated tremendously. With Siemens simulations, engineers can accurately evaluate the impact of various chemistries on cell performance, cell safety and aging as well as optimize cell design to maximize energy density and fast charging. They can virtually validate cell designs and behaviors against pack requirements and end system requirements leveraging Siemens digital twins.
This unshackles companies from the costly and time-consuming testing-only approach. We are seeing 2x to 3x acceleration in battery design and engineering, as companies are adopting our digital twin framework. With a robust PLM backbone, the digital twins of product, production and factory remain connected, thus allowing companies to account for interdependencies and effects of change across the full lifecycle.
Digital twin of battery product and production is becoming a key need for the battery industry given the rapid evolution of material chemistries and cell design as well as manufacturing techniques. Capturing a leadership position in a shifting industry necessitates agility, and those changes need to be verified rapidly to retain optimal energy and raw material usage.
One of our customers is leveraging the Siemens digital twin framework to accelerate cell engineering and optimization and virtually commission production lines for full scale manufacturing scaling from laboratory production processes. Adopting this framework has allowed them to shorten the time it takes for battery cells to go from laboratory to production at scale while also meeting sustainability goals and their own unique requirements.
Large scale production problems require integrated solutions
One of the biggest challenges for large scale production is the very high scrap rate. We have seen scrap rate being 40 percent or higher at the start of cell production, while in most cases staying just below 10 percent when the full-speed production capacity is achieved a few years after the start of production. These levels are key bottlenecks in getting production costs reduced.
To reduce scrap rate while meeting quality targets for Li-ion cell manufacturing you need executional insights on the factory floor. Integrated hardware and software for an end-to-end production process is key to improving cell production. It enables digital continuity from virtually validated process plans to paperless production execution. Manufacturing execution software connected with automation hardware through a SCADA layer allows manufacturing teams to easily orchestrate large scale production and enforce desired production practices. This is possible through integration of IT and OT which enables tracing, tracking and machine integration to rapidly identify and mitigate issues.
The ease of data sharing within a plant and the supplier network also enables efficient scheduling at a much greater scale than was possible before. Businesses can create more effective intra-plant logistics and secure supply chains to ensure the provenance of materials or the associated environmental impacts of each stage in manufacturing. A more connected manufacturing process reduces complexity while increasing flexibility by standardizing vertically and horizontally. This has been invaluable to another one of our customers with ambitions to become a European leader of EV battery cells and modules.
Intelligent production excellence for maximizing throughput and sustainable manufacturing
Li-ion cell production consists of various manufacturing steps, each one of them having a varying degree of associated time, energy and associated capital attached to them. Some of these steps, for instance cell formation and aging, can take 10 or more days, creating significant bottlenecks affecting production throughput. Manufacturing steps such as electrode drying or ink mixing need to be optimized to reduce energy consumption without affecting quality. Additionally, cell production is a very energy intensive process that can consume up to 40 units of energy to produce one unit of battery energy. This puts pressure on companies to optimize energy consumption of their plants to minimize their carbon footprint.
To address such issues, battery manufacturers can improve usage of data from machines and factories, which in a traditional battery production setup isn’t utilized well, to bring needed intelligence to battery production and factory operation.
Connecting Industrial IoT and automation technologies with a manufacturing execution system and digital twin of production is the key to data-driven manufacturing. Li-ion cell manufacturing is a highly complex process that involves approximately 600 process characteristics such as various machine parameters. Given the amount of data and the complicated interdependence of various manufacturing steps in a typical cell production process, AI is needed to understand the intercorrelation between the different steps and learn from the product/process partners. Typical use cases involve, but are not limited to, inline quality control, computer vision to measure the slurry viscosity, coating defects and prediction of the cell behavior during the aging process. Data platforms with standardized data models are critical to bringing IT and OT together and enable data harvesting from machines and factories seamlessly.
Additionally, Industrial IoT and data-driven operation allow companies to track energy consumption and optimize factory operation to reduce their carbon footprint. Downtime during factory operation can also be reduced through predictive maintenance of the machinery, improving overall production throughput.
Winning the race
Smart manufacturing practices are critical to carving out a spot as a market leader in the battery industry. Becoming a leader requires a shift left, which means doing more simulation and validation before operations ever begin. It also means reducing the time required to implement engineering changes and establishing resilient supply chains. By integrating hardware and software solutions, companies can bring executable insights to their end-to-end operations for things like scrap rate reductions and quality improvement.
Alongside the sustainability benefits of improved material efficiency, there is great financial incentive—manufacturing costs account for nearly a quarter of each cell’s cost. Reduced material demand and faster throughput is central to the ambitious scaling many battery companies will need to achieve to meet the forecast 10x growth rate over the next decade.
Implementing digitalization solutions to sustainably innovate can be daunting, but it will be important to maintaining profitability in the long term. At Siemens, we are working closely with companies looking to leap into the future of production, empowering them with our competencies in hardware, software and many other technologies, which they rely on every day to innovate.
To learn more about Siemens solutions for the battery industry, please visit Siemens.com/battery.
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