Charged EVs | Dürr Techniques debuts two-sided simultaneous electrode coater for battery-cell OEMs

German engineering agency Dürr Techniques has expanded its portfolio of two-sided simultaneous electrode coating machines with a brand new coater that makes use of Siemens applied sciences to help tension-controlled coating capabilities.

The corporate’s product is tailor-made to prospects’ necessities for a whole electrode coating course of that helps built-in solvent restoration and onsite refining together with state-of-the-art roll presses, mentioned CTS Gross sales Director Jim Hartnett.

Dürr additionally affords Tandem Coater gear with built-in solvent restoration. Dürr’s crew assesses prospects to suggest both Tandem or simultaneous two-sided coating machines to help their targets.

“Whereas the Tandem Coater stays the trade’s most well-liked technique of battery electrode manufacturing and nonetheless a viable OEM possibility for our prospects with a few years left in its lifecycle, we needed to leverage our engineering know-how from it to present our prospects one other method to elevate and increase their manufacturing,” Hartnett mentioned. “Our R&D crew went to work on fully rethinking our system’s structure, with higher coating precision, high quality, effectivity and sustainability as their design factors.”

The Dürr GigaCoater has a straight-path product stream on a single coating station. Slot-die coating on a backing roll is straight away adopted by a tensioned-web slot-die coating to coat either side of the present collector in a single go. An air flotation dryer permits simultaneous two-sided coating because the foil runs by a non-contact drying course of.

For assist with automation and controls, particularly movement management, Dürr selected Siemens associate and techniques integrator DMC.

The GigaCoater’s automation and management system comprises quite a few Siemens elements from its Completely Built-in Automation (TIA) portfolio. These embody the SIMATIC S7-1500 Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), which oversee the two-sided simultaneous coating processes to exactly handle the motion, alignment, and timing of quite a few servo motors because the copper foil substrate strikes by the machine and its float-drying modules.

The SIMATIC HMI TP900 Consolation Panels present a nine-inch diagonal touchscreen for operators to handle all steps within the coating and drying processes with full visibility. And the SINAMICS S120 Drives provide built-in security, vitality financial savings and community connectivity for a variety of energy rankings.

The Siemens SIMATIC WinCC Unified System for HMI and SCADA programming acts as an integration platform to hyperlink information from manufacturing with a buyer’s IT enterprise techniques.

Dürr’s Enterprise Growth Director David Ventola considers the two-sided simultaneous electrode coating capabilities to be a game-changer for EV battery manufacturing. “It eliminates the vexing downside of edge curl with its float-drying course of that dries either side of the electrode at identical time balancing the forces of either side. There’s no edge curl even at excessive coating weights. That alone can improve yields considerably to extend manufacturing outputs.”

The GigaCoater machine’s exact coating capabilities will help Dürr’s battery cell OEM buyer obtain high-quality yields, whereas additionally decreasing waste, labor and vitality prices and saving plant house.

“We wish to have the ability to use subtle 3D simulations in collaboration with our buyer engineering groups to assist them optimize all of those techniques and save CAPEX, then simulate full manufacturing processes to cut back their OPEX much more,” Ventola mentioned. “Ultimately, we envision enabling our prospects to make use of AI for monitoring manufacturing end-to-end and alerting operators when course of anomalies happen, to allow them to examine and forestall expensive disruptions.”

Supply: Drought