But as every story we need to start from the beginning:
when a lithium battery cell manufacturer decide to move with one or multiple equipment suppliers, in most of the cases (especially for new camers) he doesn’t have any idea about which are critical spareparts and how often they need to replace into the machine. It’s even hard to obtain these info from equipment suppliers since in many cases they have a rough list and estimated working life for each critical component. But, as you know, theory and reality not always meet each other. It’s not easy for equipment maker have constant feedback from manufacturing plants about the working life of critical parts and even some indication about the failure modes, this for sure would improve they capability to support the end user but in many cases they still with assumption and theoretical values.
The scenario is worst if we consider production plants with prototype equipment: due to tight timeline and in some cases limited budget the R&D or equipment testing team in supplier site is not able to test the working life of new components and the critical ones so in many situations they are not able to provide any estimation even due to absence of history for that dedicated equipment functional group.
So, without experience is very difficult understand how many spareparts the cell maker need to purchase and the frequency.
The answer is yes. Let us make some example:
if we look at mechanical notching machine, theoretical working life of notching tool before resharpening is about 1Mln cycles, but practically this depends on electrode composition, thickness, quality of mechanical assembly (this could affect heavily the working life) and maintenance frequency into the machine. So let’s say the working life could be 1Mln +/- 30%.
For an high speed notching machine, the throughput could be around 300-350 notch/minute. So we can say in 2-3 days the notching tools end their working life and must be resharpened. So as you can see the frequency here is high but the limiting factor is not just the working life: have you ever re-grind a notching tool for lithium battery manufacturing?
Very few in the world are able to do that. Everytime we aware costumers about that and everytime the answer is: “ahhhh don’t worry we have already a supplier which can resharp this kind of material”. The results at the end is a desperate run to search a good supplier to avoid long production stops. Koreans are masters on that, and in europe very few facilities are able to do this job, delivery time? Even 2 weeks.
But the working life of a notching tool is not infinite, after 10 to 20 re-sharpening cycle, it becomes unstable in cutting and you loose accuracy and quality so you need to search for a new one. Even here the research is desperate, but usually who is able to re-sharp is even able to design and manufacture a new one.
And this is just the example of notching tools, but we can talk for days about others like:
and many others…
If we look at emerging markets for lithium battery like europe, India and why not, even USA this is a big issue for battery produceder and in most of the case underestimated.
Then commercial agreement with equipment suppliers which foreseen the shipment of some volume of spareparts at fixed frequency and/or deep partnership with local or strategic suppliers could minimize this issue and avoid any quality drop in the production. All these activities must be in charge of manfuacturing and production team in pre-operation phase. Start to face this kind of issue in production is to late and can trigger huge waste of money and delay in product delivery.
Else, locally we need a huge development of supply chain to minimize the delivery time of this components and allows to get local suppliers avoiding to belong to the well known Korean and other asian suppliers which foreseen in some case long delivery time due to shipment of components overseas.
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