Engineering Challenges for EV Battery Manufacturers
Engineering Challenges for EV Battery Manufacturers:
1. Cost savings with the economics of scale and value engineering
2. Material Shortage and alternate design,
3. Safety,
4. Material Impurity in scaling production
Lithium-powered batteries have never been so popular, but shortages of rare earth metals are making it harder for battery makers to keep up. Researchers have made some progress in developing alternative battery chemistries to address these supply issues, but it's not unusual for them to run into extra issues when trying to scale up these new materials for batch production. From poor yields to impurities to other quality control problems, the differences between academic and industrial labs have been highlighted as an area to focus on in the future. Researchers from PNW, Penn State, U.C., Mercedes-Benz, and Thermo Fischer Scientific recently put together a paper in Nature Energy to look at the challenges manufacturers are facing and plan for new ways to develop.
Cost, material shortages, and safety issues are just a few of the challenges that battery manufacturers face as they continue to develop and enhance battery technology. Although battery prices have been steadily decreasing over the years, the cost of batteries prevents them from being widely adopted. To bring down battery costs, manufacturers must find ways to reduce raw material costs, production costs, and economies of scale.
Battery makers are having a hard time due to a lack of raw materials. With more people using batteries, there's more demand for them, but the supply chain is complicated. For instance, cobalt, which is mainly found in the Congo, is in short supply. To make up for this, there's been a lot of work done to design and make batteries that don't contain as much cobalt, or even ones that don't contain cobalt at all.
These manufacturers put a lot of effort into making sure their batteries are safe. But safety recalls can be costly for both OEMs and cell makers. To fix this, they need to make sure their quality is up to scratch. They need to keep an eye on the battery quality from start to finish. This means a lot of metrology work needs to be done. Metal impurity is a major cause of poor battery performance, and there's no way to detect it all the way through the cell manufacturing process.
In a recent paper co-authored with national laboratories, universities, and industry representatives, they examined the difficulties associated with the transfer of knowledge from the laboratory to battery manufacturing on a large-scale. There are numerous gaps in yield, impurities, and quality controls that arise when materials research progresses to the level of industrial manufacturing.
When you're in the lab, it's easy to make high-quality materials with a small amount of material (like 1 or 2 grams). But when you're manufacturing with a lot of material (like 0.1 kg or thousands of kilograms), you start to run into problems like homogeneous mixing and non-susceptible byproducts that affect the quality of the end product. So, when you're making large batches of materials, you need to use different materials processing strategies to make sure the materials you're making work on a larger scale.
Metal impurities are a huge problem in battery production, but we don't know how much tolerance they have in the industrial world. But in academia, impurity isn't usually seen as a big deal when it comes to battery performance. There's a big gap in material research in this area. If academia could figure out how to get rid of the impurities in materials during the synthesis and manufacturing process, and how to create better metrology to spot them, it could really help improve battery production quality.
The use of materials in the construction of battery cells is essential in order to ensure their performance and safety. This is due to the fact that the properties of the material itself determine the safety and performance of the cell. Generally, there are two approaches to battery construction: either using a safer material, or a material that is more energy-efficient. An example of this is the use of NMC (Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxide) and LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) in electric vehicles. NMC is more energy efficient and has a longer life cycle, while LFP is more secure but has lower energy performance. Materials science can provide guidance on which materials should be chosen and optimized to meet cell performance requirements.
The battery itself is a pretty complicated electrochemical system, and the details of the microstructure from millimeters to atoms can affect battery performance. That's why it's so important to figure out how to characterize the battery's structure. Our recent research looks into the characterization needs of materials development and manufacturing to make sure we're producing high-quality batteries. In particular, using electron microscopes, we can understand the battery's structure in multiple dimensions and scales and compare it to battery performance. The battery-specific workflow we've designed is really important and can help us get the info we need quickly and accurately so we can make better batteries and produce them more efficiently.
In battery manufacturing, there is a growing focus on automation. In the past, battery manufacturing required a lot of manual and labour-intensive processes like assembly, cell testing, and quality control. The goal of automation is to reduce human error and improve efficiency by automating those processes. In a recent paper, we looked at how smart manufacturing, such as digital twin technology, creates a feedback loop between the simulated data and the actual manufacturing process through artificial intelligence, and how it can optimise the manufacturing process and increase yield.
The automation of the metrology process in the manufacturing process will further enhance the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of battery production. The present impurity metrology system in battery cell production is labour-intensive, with the entire process ranging from sample preparation to data analysis and reporting taking hours, which has a significant impact on the efficiency of the cell production and can ultimately lead to significant costs.
As demand for batteries increases, so too does the need for sustainable battery disposal solutions. Recycling and reusing batteries will not only reduce the environmental footprint of battery manufacturing and use, but it will also help address the raw material shortage. The future of battery design and manufacturing is bright and full of promise, with exciting innovations on the horizon to create safer, more effective and more sustainable battery storage solutions