Electricity and Control October 2023

INDUSTRY 4.0 + IIOT

Setting tomorrow’s battery industry in motion

Leveraging the right network technology can help lithium-ion battery (LiB) manufacturers meet challenging demands and growing market opportunities. CC-Link IETSN network technology helped a premier LiB company simplify its manufacturing systems and comply with exacting product specifications.

T he widely increasing use of LiB cells – in applications from smartphones to tablets and ear buds, and increasingly in electric vehicles (EVs) – is driving exponential growth in LiB cell manufacturing. To meet rising global demand, LiB producers need to scale up their capacity quickly and ensure they are delivering high quality products. This requires high-precision high-yield, high-throughput manufacturing systems. John Browett, General Manager at CC-Link Partner Association - Europe, explains that LiB manufacturing is a complex, multistage process, with most of the stages based on established converting principles. Standardly, and in simple terms, an electrolyte slurry is mixed and then applied to a metal foil as a fine layer, which is dried before passing through an intricate series of slitting, winding and cutting activities to produce the finished cell. These process stages require a precisely coordinated series of multi-axis motion control operations to deliver the required quality and avoid waste. The performance of the finished cell in terms of capaci ty, internal resistance and reliability is highly dependent on multiple parameters, such as coating uniformity, film ten sion and others. Moreover, as the demand for lithium and other critical raw materials continues to grow worldwide, it is clear that material wastage caused by out of spec prod uct should be minimised as far as possible. Adding to the application challenges, as battery manu facturers seek to increase cell capacity, foils and their coat ings are constantly becoming thinner. At the same time, materials need to be handled at higher and higher speeds to meet production targets driven by market demand.

Furthermore, besides the critical motion control processes, various associated machine functions need to be integrated into the production process to provide the required function ality. These include visual coating inspection, film tension, tab welding, general machine control and safety systems. Key to addressing these challenges is an open industrial Ethernet technology that delivers high performance along with network convergence. This provides for productivity and performance targets to be met, and for machine designs to be simplified by combining multiple traffic types onto a sin gle network architecture. As a result, machine complexity can be reduced, which in turn decreases project lead time, accelerates scalability and maximises productivity. TSN benefits in LiB manufacturing When a leading producer of automated LiB manufacturing lines was looking for a new technology that would improve the productivity of its systems, while simplifying their design and reducing time to market, CC-Link IE TSN stood out. CC-Link IE TSN is an open industrial Ethernet technol ogy that was the first to combine gigabit bandwidth with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). As such, it offers several benefits to machine builders in this industry. First, the gi gabit bandwidth means large volumes of production data can be handled easily, without affecting machine perfor mance or plant productivity. Further, since data is shared at gigabit speeds, the setup offers a scalable solution that can continue to meet the increasingly demanding needs of LiB manufacturers. And, operation at these speeds means that multiple motion axes can be synchronised on micro second intervals, providing a degree of process quality not previously possible. Additionally, the integration of TSN into the network means several different traffic types can be combined onto a single network architecture. Hence the large and complex multi axis motion control system of the company’s machines would not have to accommodate the cost penalty of having to use multiple networks to handle motion control separately from other machine functions such as visual inspection, safety and general machine control. With CC-Link IE TSN’s capabilities, all these disparate communication needs can share a common network architecture. The result is a simpler, less expensive machine design – and the machines are easier to build and maintain and can be delivered more quickly, winning significant competitive advantages for the OEM.

A leading producer of automated lithium-ion battery manu facturing lines recognised the benefits of using CC-Link IE TSN networking technology – to improve the productivity of its systems, simplify their design and reduce time to market.

6 Electricity + Control OCTOBER 2023