Product-specific Identifiers and Data Aggregation for Enabling Traceability in Battery Cell Production

In the context of the ongoing energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies, suitable energy storage systems play a major role. An important aspect here is sustainable battery cell production itself, but also the generation of transparency about the battery life cycle, e. g. in form of a battery passport. To remain competitive and to ensure sustainable production, high product quality with low scrap rates during production has to be achieved. This is possible with process optimization and digitalization. One underlying requirement lies in a traceability system. To enhance quality of battery cells as well as to minimize scrap, tracing at the finest granularity serves as a key enabler. A broadly applied traceability solution has not yet been fully explored and central challenges lie in the linking of continuous and discrete production steps ' both from a digital and physical perspective. In this paper, we propose a concept for realizing a traceability system in battery cell production based on a product-specific identifier (ID) and the underlying data aggregation. The procedure for tracing an ID through the production steps of a battery cell, the assignment of relevant production data and the prototypical implementation, are presented. For this purpose, concept for battery cell production is introduced, which uses an object-oriented approach to link the different stages of the product ID with the respective production progress. The data generated in the process is aggregated and stored in a database, with the ID enabling unique assignment. Existing dependencies between individual entities of components to be traced and the assignment of corresponding data are shown by means of entity-relationship diagrams. Finally, the application of the concept and the validation are demonstrated using the first processes of electrode production.