UK Battery Industrialisation Centre

Industry: Battery Production  I Customer: UKBIC - UK Battery Industrialisation Center

UKBIC is the UK’s national manufacturing battery development facility, providing manufacturing scale-up and skills for the battery sector.

The purpose-built facility is where businesses come to develop their battery manufacturing processes at the scale they need to move to industrial production. It's also where those working in the industry can develop new skills by joining UKBIC’s production line, learning from its specialist teams.

Created with an initial investment of £130m, an additional £74m from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is being used to enhance and expand the facility by installing a new Flexible Pilot Line to bridge the gap between UKBIC’s larger scale production line and small-scale demonstrator lines available elsewhere. The organisation is also building a new Battery Development Laboratory, a Clean and Dry Zone, and Cell Characterisation area.

Challenge

During the manufacturing process of the Anode and Cathode Foils used to create battery cells, a slurry is applied to both sides of Copper and Aluminium foils to create Mother Rolls of Anode and Cathode material. These are eventually cut and formed to create individual batteries in cylinder or pouch form.

Once applied to the respective foils, the slurry is dried on the foils in long flotation drying chambers where the environmental conditions are precisely controlled to avoid defects.

On the Cathode Foil line any harmful emissions are recovered, condensed and removed via a carbon bed. The extraction system is powered by two motors located high in the mezzanine level of the facility where access is limited. Monitoring the operational status of these motors helps to avoid unplanned downtime and potential loss of production.

Solution

Using the Balluff CMTK Condition Monitoring Tool Kit in conjunction with the Balluff BCM Condition Monitoring Sensors, parameters such as temperature and vibration can be continuously recorded. The data on the operational status of the two motors can be be accessed remotely by Production and Maintenance personnel.

Benefits

How does the BCM Sensors work?

Balluff BCM Condition Monitoring Sensors are mounted directly onto the Carbon Bed Exhaust and Cathode Fume Extraction system motors to monitor the temperature and vibration of the motors themselves. This allows the continues monitoring of the motor and fan assemblies.

Products

BCM - The condition monitoring sensor measures various physical variables - such as vibration, temperature, humidity and ambient pressure - and supplies the recorded data to a higher-level system via IO-Link. The data obtained can be used not only for plant control, but can also be further evaluated and analyzed for diagnostic purposes.

CMTK - With the Condition Monitoring Toolkit, we offer you a holistic solution to monitor the condition of machines and processes. It contains everything you need: from sensors to data acquisition to visualization. At the same time, you benefit from great flexibility thanks to compatibility with all IO-Link sensors, but also simple operation thanks to the intuitive software. Thus, with the CMTK, you can implement condition monitoring entirely according to your needs in just a few minutes.