Interview with Bernd Fuchsbichler, Project Manager at VARTA

What challenges do you face in upscaling the manufacturing of cell components like electrodes and gel polymer electrolytes?

Maintaining the quality is a major challenge in upscaling. For this reason, quality must be kept in mind at every step of the process. From the manufacturing of the electrodes to the gel polymer separator up to the cell build. The solvent-free gellification of electrolytes and the resulting innovative gellified electrodes and separators are very recently developed technologies. The use of this new innovative technology in this project raises many challenges related to manufacturing aspects, regarding the optimisation of innovative gellified battery layers. Sometimes a one-to-one upscaling from a small laboratory scale to a larger prototype level is not possible. In this respect, upscaling and the industrial manufacturing process must be considered right from the start of development on a lab scale to ensure a smooth subsequent implementation.

How does VARTA Innovation optimize the manufacturing conditions for the cells to ensure they meet performance and safety standards?

It can easily be the case that process steps during manufacturing have to be adapted and modified, especially if you want to develop and implement an innovative new technology like in the NEXTCELL project. For this reason, early in the project, the requirements of the use cases (automotive case and stationary case) were discussed and defined for all materials and components together with the project partners. Combined with the specification of the test conditions, which should reflect the use in the respective application fields, it should be possible to recognise and avoid problems at an early stage. Therefore, an easier adaption of the manufacturing parameters from lab scale to prototype level should be ensured to achieve the targeted goals and safety standards of the cells.

After manufacturing the cells, what kind of electrical and safety assessments are performed on them? How do these assessments help the project in refining the cell designs and improving their performance?

In addition to electrochemical standard tests, such as cycling at different temperatures and power capability, internationally standardised and common safety tests are also carried out to ensure the safety of the cells. These safety tests are based on automotive testing standards like FreedomCAR, UN 38.3 etc. Furthermore, protocols for ageing tests based on a realistic user profile (WLTP-based) will also be carried out. Finally, the results and findings from these tests will be reported back to the project partners so that they can be incorporated into the further development of the materials and cell components.