Building Blocks for an Automated Quality Assurance Concept in High Throughput Battery Cell Manufacturing

The increasing demand for sustainable energy raises the request for battery cells. Industry and research are faced with challenges like complex processes, complex machinery, and many intra-process interactions within the field of battery cell production. Major problems, such as low process stability and quality fluctuations, lead to high scrap rates. Result is a reduced sustainability in the production process. To address these challenges, the main content of this paper is a conceptual design of a virtual Quality Gate (QG) system, for quality assurance and quality prediction. The concept of virtual QG combines physical and digital elements. On the physical side actuators, sensors, and measurement technologies are included to provide the raw data. The digital side of virtual QG includes necessary elements for data acquisition, data processing, data analysis and information provision for the decision-making process in the real world. Focus of the presented approach is illustrating how to select the appropriate location of QG for quality decisions in conjunction with the derivation of necessary decisions, process information and evaluation of measurement technology that is needed.