The rising significance of batteries is underscored by their broad adoption in a wide range of industries, ranging from consumer electronics to electric vehicles. A real-world battery features tremendous structural complexities across a wide range of length scales.
It is imperative to devote robust research and development endeavors not only for discovering new materials and chemistries, but also for tackling the diverse challenges in battery manufacturing. Critical aspects to consider include throughput, accuracy, robustness, scalability, reproducibility, and cost-effectiveness across the manufacturing pipeline, in which numerous precision processes are involved, critically affecting the quality of the final product.
The intricate network of processes involved in battery manufacturing underscores the need for developing efficient and widely applicable methodologies to identify and address any pain points encountered in synthesizing battery materials, fabricating cell components, and assembling battery cells. By addressing these challenges holistically and implementing innovative solutions across the entire manufacturing pipeline, the industry can strive towards improving product consistency and safety, reducing costs and defect rates, and ultimately transitioning to a more sustainable energy solution.
Our research group is active in this area. We combine high-throughput experimental probes, such as X-rays, optical, infrared, and ultrasound, with machine learning methods, e.g., computer vision and compress sensing algorithms, to investigate the intermediate products at different stages of the battery manufacturing pipeline. We aim to develop methods that can capture structure defects rapidly, accurately, and robustly. This not only can be used to prevent the propagation of defects into the downstream production stages (when implemented for in-line inspection), but also could inform the development of process optimization and failure mitigation strategies. Importantly, we focus on methodologies that are compatible with real-world battery manufacturing pipelines.
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