Traceability in Battery Cell Production

Abstract

The manufacturing of lithium-ion battery (LIB) cells has been identified as a hotspot addressing growing price competition and the environmental and economic pressures on technologies along the value creation chain. Effective quality management strategies (QMS) are essential to meet these rising challenges. Herein, data-driven technologies have fostered an improved understanding of existing process–structure–properties and their process chain covering interdependencies. However, there are often limited in their capability due to the lack of availability or in-depth information about the manufactured product, existing incidences (i.e., product faults), and the possibility to deploy inline QMS due to insufficient knowledge about the history and condition of the identified products. Against this background, this work describes the implementation of a traceability system as part of QMS for battery cell production and presents a developed framework to overcome challenges from an LIB production perspective for traditional traceability approaches. In addition, this article discusses the implementation of technologies, focusing on the identification and traceability on electrode-sheet level through continuous and feature-based approaches. With those technologies implemented, the deployment of quality gates within the electrode production is now possible to not only improve quality inline, but also discover new possibilities for future electrode balancing to reduce manufacturing costs and the overall environmental impact.