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worked with Festo to devise a new front-
end solution with an air bearing, which
was previously only used for the solar or
electrical industry,” explains Dr. Korff.
Objects slide evenly
Both the solar and electrical industries
use the air bearing ATBT from Festo for
the contactless transport of sheets of
glass and delicate film. A layer of air on
the fine surface allows objects to glide
evenly. For ads-tec, the engineers from
Festo used the so-called reversal effect,
with an extensive vacuum for the hand-
ling of battery packs in the production
system. “With conventional solutions we
could only grip the cells in certain places
using vacuum generators, which meant
that reliable holding of the cell could not
be guaranteed,” says Michael Karcher.
Because the air bearing grips the entire
surface, the bonding process is no longer
prone to failure caused by production.
Automation optimises e-mobility
Batteries move up a gear
There are currently 2,300 electric cars
on Germany’s roads. This figure is set to reach
one million by 2020. The industry is currently dealing with the crucial question of how
to make the leap to low-cost, high-volume battery production. The automation industry
has some answers.
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n order to make electromobility more
accessible for the broader market,
the cost of batteries used in electric
vehicles needs to come down. They
are still one of the biggest cost drivers
in electromobility. The problem is that
battery production is still predominantly
a manual process with a large number of
individual steps.
Competence cuts costs
“Between 30 and 40 per cent of the value
added in purely electric vehicles is due to
the battery,” says Michael Karcher, Head
of the industry segment Electronics
and Solar at Festo. “If we are to eventually
have efficient mass production, we
need to set up technologically flexible
electrode and cell production for the
manufacture of battery prototypes with
a high degree of standardisation and
automation. This will allow production
costs to be reduced and ensure the quality
of the results.” This demands effective
and reliable automation competence at
all levels. Mechatronic solutions, which
integrate expertise from different areas
of process and factory automation and
transfer it to the latest technologies in
battery production, look promising.
Innovation with mechatronics
“Our customers from the automation in-
dustry have a good understanding of the
automotive sector when it comes to their
current field of activities. However, when
it comes to the optimum conditions for
battery production engineering, they
are more or less starting from scratch,”
says Karcher. In order to fundamentally
redefine processes you need innovators
like mechatronics engineers and a
willingness on the part of companies to
innovate. This is exactly what happened
in the case of automation system sup-
plier and plant manufacturer ads-tec. The
company, which is based near Stuttgart,
develops automated production systems
for high-performance lithium-ion energy
storage devices.
Protection of sensitive cells
For the FUEL project initiated by the
Federal Ministry of Education and Re-
search (BMBF), ads-tec first developed
a production method for automating the
bonding, feeding and handling of cells
on a laboratory scale. According to Head
of Automation Dr. Peter Korff, the aim
was to provide production facilities that
would allow the fast, low-cost production
of cells and battery systems. “Lithium-
ion cells are sensitive. We must make
sure that we maintain cell quality during
the process and take care not to damage
or contaminate them, particularly
during handling. Because we have to
create a whole new set of conditions for
the accumulator production technology,
we are open to new solutions and ideas.
For handling the lithium-ion cells, we