Courtesy: Siemens
If you’re in the battery manufacturing space, you’ll be working hard to ensure your business is ready to scale up battery production to meet the demand surge created by electric vehicles and energy storage.
To take full advantage of the opportunity, battery manufacturers must reduce engineering and validation efforts and deliver high-production battery cell manufacturing capabilities while hitting delivery, throughput, cost, and sustainability targets.
In this blog, we cover how you can use simulation to create much more efficient validation and optimization of your battery production lines, as well as diving deeper into the digital twin techniques that will help you ensure effective scale-up of your battery manufacturing.
Doing more with less: battery scale-up vs skill shortage
The pressure of building production lines for battery manufacturing is growing fast.
On the one hand, battery manufacturers and their customers are experiencing a growing shortage of labor and skill, and on the other hand, more efficient and flexible battery production lines are required.
To keep up with demand, battery manufacturers must embrace modular design and new technologies, transform their business models and enable sustainable, long-lasting operations.
Eliminate 95% of battery manufacturing errors pre-commissioning of your production lines
Planning a new plant or updating an existing one is an expensive endeavour, and finding ways to cut down costs in the planning phase is an essential task for those responsible for planning new battery production facilities.
Battery manufacturers can use virtual testing to examine the interaction of components across production machines, lines and cells by utilizing modern simulation tools.
Finding one platform that’s capable of digitally mapping your entire plant unlocks efficiencies that will benefit your whole battery production operation.
Setting up battery production simulation for quick operational scaling
To achieve the battery cell manufacturing benefits outlined above, you’ll need a holistic and consistent tool landscape that lets you bring your thinking on standardization, modularization and simulation to the cutting edge of available technology.
If you can implement a solution with seamless interfaces between all line engineering processes and a continuous feedback loop from the operating lines, you’ll be able to automate your line engineering with an end-to-end approach that’s faster, more flexible and more efficient.
Addressing the skilled labour shortage through effective training strategies
Comprehensive workforce training is crucial when you’re looking to implement effective scale-up optimization. A significant skilled labour shortage in battery production is necessitating recruitment from adjacent industries.
These hires will require extensive training to ensure that your workforce is ready to meet production demands. To address this challenge, you’ll need a holistic training approach that provides a spectrum of customizable learning paths tailored to specific needs in your battery production facility.
This strategy should encompass both virtual and on-site training options to provide flexibility and accessibility for trainees. Virtual training facilitates rapid and continuous learning without geographical constraints, while on-site training offers hands-on experience in a practical environment.
Combining these methods broadens the accessibility of training, allowing you to quickly and easily ensure high operational efficiency for your workforce.
This approach ensures that employees are well-prepared to handle the demands of high-scale battery production environments efficiently, thereby mitigating the impact of the labor shortage on production capabilities.
Challenges and innovations in intra-logistics for large-scale production
To achieve large-scale battery production, you need to overcome the challenges of managing intralogistics efficiently. Unlike pilot plants, where manual steps may suffice, gigafactory production means you’ll need fully automated logistics to ensure smooth operations.
The complexity and scale of operations hit a new level, where hundreds of communication devices must be coordinated simultaneously, raising not only logistical hurdles but also severe cybersecurity concerns.
Innovative tools and iterative processes can address these issues and optimize your logistics, but the implementation of logistics solutions is not a one-off task. It’s an iterative process that adapts to the evolving demands of production scale.
Each phase of your battery production scale-up should be supported by technologies and vendors tailored to the specific capacity requirements at your stage of maturity. As production scales, your system should undergo continuous refinement to ensure efficiency and effectiveness, leveraging real-time data and analytics to make necessary adjustments.
This approach is crucial not only to address the immediate challenges of your logistics management but also to set the foundation for future enhancements and scalability in large-scale battery production environments.
Enhancing machine commissioning through virtual simulation
Battery machine commissioning can get complicated fast at the gigafactory level, particularly when multiple machines require simultaneous commissioning.
Misconfigurations and untested machines often lead to delays. Using simulation tools for pre-validation and virtual commissioning gives you a robust solution to these challenges by enabling a comprehensive examination of machine setups before physical implementation.
Modular simulation approaches are optimal, as they are flexible enough to fit any requirement while ensuring the exacting precision you need for your battery machine commissioning.
Using digital manufacturing tools to virtually validate battery machinery
By utilizing digital manufacturing tools, you can virtually assess machine behaviour, covering everything from motion control to safety protocols and automation programs.
This pre-validation process not only confirms the machine’s functionality but also facilitates remote testing, allowing adjustments to be made efficiently wherever your teams operate from across the globe using digital twin technology.
The benefits of these modular and virtual approaches are substantial, leading to up to a 25% reduction in commissioning time. This equates to a month saved on a typical four-month schedule, a significant acceleration of your battery production scale-up.
Your virtual validation efforts also significantly mitigate risks by enabling thorough testing before physical deployment, thus reducing potential machine errors and associated costs.
Enhancing production efficiency with predictive maintenance and connectivity
Another way digital manufacturing transformation contributes to your scale-up potential is the shop floor connectivity and data historicization you can implement. With this in place, you can ensure a seamless flow of real-time data across production systems and reduce costs for your battery production operation.
This approach gives you a strong foundation for the data-driven manufacturing that’s essential for large-scale production environments. Implementing a fully automated solution gives you the detection and diagnostics efficiency that is necessary for gigafactory-level battery manufacturing.
With the right solution, predictive maintenance technology can scale from 10 to over 10,000 machines and significantly reduce unplanned downtimes, which crucially minimizes the loss of costly materials during production stops.
Maintenance costs are also considerably reduced, enhancing overall operational efficiency. The integration of predictive maintenance strategies that utilize your data flow collectively contributes to:
- Up to 20% decrease in production costs
- Up to 50% reduction in unplanned downtime
- Up to 40% reduction in maintenance expenses
- Up to 55% increase in maintenance staff productivity
