Analyzing and Maximizing Line Productivity - Bottleneck Identification and Predictive Maintenance

The production of battery cells is made in interlinked production lines, which have a high number of parameters that influence the resulting product. Consequently, material properties and process parameters have an influence on the effectiveness and output, so the optimization becomes a challenging task. The optimization of productivity itself can be achieved by three main optimization goals: increasing equipment availability, boosting performance and reducing quality losses. Since quality may be subjectively defined, this chapter focuses on solutions to increase availability and performance. In fact, the approach of root cause analysis and predictive maintenance is presented. In this case, root cause analysis focuses on performance optimization and predictive maintenance on the availability of the production system. In the following, both topics will be elaborated in the form of a literature review and a conceptual presentation. Afterward, the application of both topics will be discussed or illustrated with examples. Finally, predictive maintenance as well as root cause analysis will be discussed and an outlook on both applications in battery cell production will be given.