Electrical Power & Protection


Siemens and Voltaiq collaborate on battery manufacturing

February 2024 Electrical Power & Protection

Siemens Digital Industries Software and Voltaiq are collaborating to accelerate battery manufacturing, by combining their strengths to offer unparalleled capabilities. This collaboration aims to bring together the production-proven capabilities of Siemens’ Insights Hub and Voltaiq’s Enterprise Battery Intelligence. Customers can gain access to unparalleled capability specific to battery-domain companies to help rapidly scale operations smoothly, from initial testing to full-scale production lines.

“Our collaboration with Voltaiq aligns with Siemens’ ongoing mission to continue delivering IIoT value. By integrating our efforts, we not only help to enhance operational decision making, but also assist our customers to accelerate the digital transformation of their organisations, contributing to a new era in battery manufacturing,” says Raymond Kok, SVP and managing director for Siemens Digital Industries.

“The battery industry is struggling to scale and needs to improve quality and decrease scrap rates rapidly in order to stay competitive,” says Tal Sholklapper, CEO and co-founder of Voltaiq. “By joining forces with Siemens, we are able to deliver a complete solution to help contribute to an electrified future.”

The world is relying on battery-powered products more than ever, from the largest vehicles to the smallest personal devices. Experts are forecasting a 14-fold increase in battery demand between 2018 and 2030 and a five-fold growth in battery cell production from 2020 to 2030 for electric vehicles alone. The increased demand for battery manufacturing introduces numerous challenges and complexities, including quality control, production efficiency, waste reduction, and cost minimisation.

The collaboration aims to tackle the following key challenges:

• Quality control and consistency: Consistently ensuring each battery meets the highest standards for performance and safety is challenging. Variations in manufacturing conditions can lead to inconsistencies in battery quality, so it is important to maintain rigorous quality control throughout production. To stay competitive, manufacturers must accelerate material and design innovations and optimise battery costs, while reaching energy density targets and ensuring safe battery utilisation.

• Increasing production: Scaling up battery production to meet increasing demand, especially for electric vehicles, without compromising quality or efficiency, is a significant challenge. This includes managing larger automated giga facilities at scale with consistent machine performance, while understanding and responding to the influence of complex machinery on the characteristics of battery cells.

• Process efficiency and waste reduction: Battery manufacturing involves complex chemical processes that are complicated to manage. These are a combination of batch process, continuous process, and discrete process. This complexity can lead to waste and inefficiencies. Manufacturers strive to optimise these processes to minimise waste and improve overall efficiency, addressing both cost and environmental concerns.

• High costs: Manufacturers must find ways to reduce costs, without compromising product quality. These include the cost of raw materials, manufacturing processes and technology development.

Siemens’ Insights Hub IIoT solutions, combined with Voltaiq’s comprehensive suite of battery-specific monitoring, visualisation and advanced analytics capabilities, provides customers with a seamless end-to-end solution for managing and optimising battery cell manufacturing.

The joint solution addresses the challenges faced in the critical finishing stage of battery production, which makes up a significant portion of production costs, by helping to reduce the risk associated with discovering problems late in the production cycle where yield and profitability are most likely to decrease.

For more information contact Siemens South Africa, [email protected], www.siemens.co.za


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