Focus on automation in battery production

The new indus­try expert for elec­tro­mo­bil­i­ty at B&R is Ron­ny Guber. With him, the com­pa­ny now has a cen­tral con­tact for auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­tur­ers and their sup­pli­ers for the first time. Guber is con­vinced that low­er unit costs and high­er pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in bat­tery pro­duc­tion are only pos­si­ble with intel­li­gent automa­tion concepts.
He knows the prob­lem that auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­tur­ers and their sup­pli­ers have in com­mon: Con­ven­tion­al bat­tery man­u­fac­tur­ing plants run vir­tu­al­ly in stop-and-go mode, and even minor mal­func­tions often result in a com­plete stand­still. These man­u­fac­tur­ers need fac­to­ries that enable con­tin­u­ous high-speed pro­duc­tion in a small foot­print. “We are at a turn­ing point in the his­to­ry of auto­mo­tive pro­duc­tion. Only those who can keep pace with bat­tery pro­duc­tion will be able to sur­vive in the mar­ket in the long term,” Guber said. 

Automation creates new paths

To increase speed and effi­cien­cy in bat­tery pro­duc­tion, for exam­ple, robot­ics and image pro­cess­ing must be close­ly syn­chro­nized with a track sys­tem. This allows bat­tery cells to be moved indi­vid­u­al­ly through a net­work of process sta­tions. Pre­vi­ous­ly sta­tion­ary tasks are com­plet­ed while the cells are trans­port­ed through the plant at high speed.

“With this approach, we are able to speed up some pro­duc­tion steps by 90% or more and increase through­put per square meter many times over.”

- Ron­ny Guber