Going the extra mile to keep control charts on hand on the manufacturing floor, noting upper and lower bounds, maintains optimized material standards from start to finish, delivering exceptional quality control and performance demanded by OEMs.įrom Blueprint To Factory: The Final Step

To make battery material production manageable at a large scale, teams need to design for process control on reaction parameters, such as temperature and pressure. As yield requirements increase, particularly for the thousands of tons required for a singular automaker’s fleet, the challenge lies in stabilizing the reactions.

Many process designs for battery materials require exotic conditions, such as a vacuum, which are easily achievable in the lab but veer into dangerous territory at scale as conditions become increasingly difficult to control. It is difficult to handle, especially on a larger scale. The fine particulate matter used for battery manufacturing presents challenges in itself. Now that the process is locked down, how do companies make sure the yield of materials is as close to 100% as possible? It all comes down to control. Getting To 100% Requires Attention To The Details

This guarantees that batch #1 is identical to batch #999, which is exactly what automotive OEMs need for their fleets. After a continuous process is refined at the pilot scale, large-scale production needs to be modular in order to meet global demand. For companies that are short-sighted and fail to transition to a more streamlined process, production will become costly and inefficient and ultimately unattractive to customers. But as you build up capacity, the process needs to be engineered into a single continuous step. For a complex and massive undertaking like materials production for the EV industry, homogeneity is necessary.įor time, money or short-term simplicity, the manufacturing process may start as a batch process. Similarly, the materials manufacturing process is most efficient as a continuous process. A car gets better gas mileage on the highway because it is a continuous road with no stop signs, reducing the need to ramp up and down. Think about the manufacturing process in terms of a car on the highway versus in the streets. From an efficiency standpoint, the ideal reactor technology is continuous by design to eliminate the batch process and potential inconsistencies from batch to batch. In batch processes, engineers ramp up (and down) different processes, putting undue stress on the reactor equipment, which can lead to failures and poor product quality. Manufacturing through multistep batch processes is inefficient, relying on many hard-to-control factors. As quality is maintained throughout the process, so is the cost. The two critical characteristics that guarantee the ideal end result are continuity and control. If given a choice between an expensive, multistep manufacturing process or a streamlined, continuous one, automotive OEMs always choose the latter for their ability to more easily maintain controlled, repeatable quality. The Hidden Value Of A Continuous Manufacturing Process Of course, some unexpected challenges will continue to happen along the way, but you will be in a far better position to address them. By forecasting all the potential challenges to scaling, companies can better maintain the integrity of the output - the product - from the first, small pilot facility to all subsequent factories. In anticipation of such unexpected outcomes, the best strategy is to develop a plan for the manufacturing process as detailed as the blueprint for the technology itself.

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