Let’s start from the beginning: when a company have to establish a lithium battery manufacturing plant, needs to produce a feasibility study first which include all CAPEX and OPEX items and a project roadmap which should satisfy all the investors.
It’s not just a matter to find a place and build up a factory but is a very tricky relationship between supply chain, product development, skilled human resources and even local authorities permission.
The first production line, even called pilot production line, is the most painful for many reason: is the first excercise of the company trying to produce their product in several units per minutes with automated equipment considering a manufacturing process more or less established.
Unfortunately the pilot project is not so smooth: in the pilot production line, especially new camers, don’t have any experience about lithium battery manufacturing and no clue about what is needed and what is the optimum to run the production. In some case indeed, we face underdesign or as opposite overdesign in term of technical requirement for automated equipment and check quality inspection devices.
Equipment suppliers must provide budgetary quotation without any clear evidence how the product looks like or at least what is the target manufacturing process flow. In several cases is the cell manufacturer which is asking to equipment maker to suggest to them the best manufacturing process!
But, based on production line layout and utilities related to each single equipment, the battery manufacturer can start to design the production layout and provide all details to Dry room design and construction company which need to design not just the clean room itself but make all calculation even for HVAC and Dehumidifer.
But as you can see this is a close loop: equipment suppliers are not able to provide detailed equipment lis
t and details which represent a must for dry room design constructions. So what usually companies do is just foreseen spare space which represent for sure additional CAPEX but could be useful in the future for any kind of mistake or misevaluation.
When the equipment arrive in the factory, all installation and commissioning activities start and in many case the equipment validation must be done with final and real material….
…. but everybody know electrode manufacturing is a real pain. Only if electrode manufacturing start up phase is foreseen some months before the rest of the production line the schedule could be smooth; otherwise the risk is to start the cell assembly line commissioning and test with dummy material or even stop the activities due to incoming material absence.
Then the operations start but it’s tool late to train the manpower. So manufacturing manager need to study in advance, during pre-operation phase, all strategy how to train the engineers without having equipment in the production plant. But as you can image, the start of production is a cold shower for everyone.
After the SAT the equipment supplier leave the production plant and with them even big part of the knowledge in battery manufacturing. Starting from here the battery manufacturer is alone and need to run the production by himself trying to learn from mistake.
So what’s happen from Pilot to Mass production plant?
Currently the scale up is not so easy and sustainable for many reasons:
The Dry Room OPEX vary with the Dry room Volume
So, honestly, it’s very hard to image the battery industry can manage this scaling up phase with the current technology and this weak supply chain. High speed equipment is the key to minimize production footprint, manpower and then OPEX in term of $/kWh produced.
Even if it sounds quite easy to obtain we need to consider the automation can run at super high speed, just to consider there are equipment able to produce 1’000 gigarettes pack per minute!! But the entire automation supply chain in battery business have to be contaminated by other industries where the productivities are huge and the electronic and technology industry already develop dedicated technology able to support those speed.
In the last 10-15 years the battery automation business didn’t make any big improvement compare to cell and pack technology, so we need to move out from the confort zone, start to talk with new suppliers and companies which have great experience in other industries but with several similarities to lithium battery manufacturing business.