Unlocking Battery Production Efficiency with Siemens, AWS, and Voltaiq
The battery industry is extremely competitive, with large incumbents carrying a wealth of experience and small start-ups with innovative ideas. But what all of them need is accessible and actionable data from their designs and production processes. Data-driven manufacturing is at the heart of how businesses will be able to not just accelerate, but succeed in the battery market. And that is a rapidly growing need given the depressed prices individual cells are fetching at the moment. Every cent saved is a cent earned in this case.
And mirroring the strong partnerships within the industry, Puneet Sinha of Siemens sat down with counterparts from AWS and Voltaiq to talk about their collective vision for the future of data-driven manufacturing in the battery industry. You can listen to the first half of their discussion on The Battery Podcast right here, but keep on reading below to get a summary of their most important points.
The goal of growth within the battery industry has butted against the costs of scaling for a while. But it is becoming a harder budget to balance as the per unit price of cells drop. Multi-year ramp-ups with high initial scrap rates are eating into the initial investments of manufacturers. The need is to bring these facilities up to snuff faster and do so through data-driven workflows.
A challenge for the battery industry is that innovative new products also require parallel development of the processing and manufacturing phases of development. Parallelizing as much of this as possible in the digital twin helps bring new designs online faster than would be possible in a sequential plan. Data helps drive this development by providing an accurate representation of the physical world, historical context for brownfield projects, and a link to continuously update models once a manufacturing line is running. But that data still needs to be actionable. Machines have been spitting out terabytes of data for years, making it useable is the key to optimizations.
Data availability and actionability is part of Amazon Web Services’ business model. In the discussion with Puneet and Tal Sholklapper from Voltaiq, AWS’ Hari Gopalakrishna brought up the possible role of AI in sifting through the mountain of data. A cloud-trained and locally deployed vision model was able to improve the false positive rate of the existing system and accelerate the response time. This allowed the line to run faster and deliver 15% more product. For a factory producing over 5 million cells a day, that is a massive ROI lead by a data-driven approach.
Streamlining development from zero is a long process, acquiring land for the site, purchasing machinery, connecting equipment, and that is before a single cell is produced. Shortening this is a major goal for Voltaiq, as Tal explained in the discussion. Manufacturers will want customization to fit their exact circumstances, but by modularizing some of this early work the early architecture development can happen while still acquiring equipment or laying concrete for a new factory. This reference design might look nothing like the final factory, but it helps make informed decisions for what the factory should be in the end.
There is a lot of great discussion that I didn’t cover here in the summary, and I would recommend you tune in to get the full story of data-driven battery manufacturing. But you may want to subscribe to the Battery Podcast for the second half of this discussion diving into how business are integrating a data-driven approach in their operations. And as always, you can learn even more about battery on our website siemens.com/battery.
If you want to dive into the full discussion, hit play on the video below for the complete stage presentation from the Battery Show 2024.
Siemens Digital Industries (DI) is a leading innovator in automation and digitalization. In close cooperation with its partners and customers, DI is the driving force for the digital transformation in the process and manufacturing industries. With its Digital Enterprise portfolio, Siemens provides companies of all sizes with all the necessary products, along with consistent solutions and services for the integration and digitalization of the entire value chain. Optimized for the specific requirements of individual industries, this unique portfolio enables customers to enhance their productivity and flexibility. DI continuously extends its portfolio to include innovations and the integration of future-oriented technologies. Siemens Digital Industries, with its headquarters in Nuremberg, has a workforce of around 72,000 people worldwide.
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