Digital Twins for Battery EV Production can advance us towards a net-zero future

Todays' UK Government Faraday Battery Challenge announcement signals the start of an acceleration path to Net Zero Technologies, and improving the chances to achieve 2050 Climate Goals across all industries.

The growth in new technologies to counter the challenges of climate CO2 and other Green House Gas effects is seen most clearly in the growth in Electric Vehicles, and with countries and policies shaping the decisions on the Energy Trilemma. We hope the we can accelerate the Net Zero Technologies with balance, and momentum as we stride ever faster to use research from labs and take this technology to the scale which has significant impact.

Two challenges in Battery Electric Vehicle 'scale-up' are;

1. The pace of new battery formats and getting these to quality standards with yield, ultimately the cost of one battery cell being recalled from a pack in a car could cost 10,000 the cost of the cell.
2. The growth in scale-up volumes is not fast enough to meet the demand for Electric Vehicles, and given raw materials, and business cases for investments.

It sounds familiar as these challenges in scaling up manufacturing within a timely way and at quality are in many industries, projects like the DigiTWIN project from today's announcement are relevant in other technology acceleration paths;

'Digital twin for quality and yield improvement at battery gigafactory (DigiTwin).

One of the largest challenges for scaling battery production, is the speed at which high quality batteries need to be created. The other is the ability to increase the volume whilst maintaining productivity.

Using an open access X-ray computed tomography (CT) digital solution Waygate Technologies with the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre (UKBIC) are working towards significantly improving productivity at the facility. A 1% yield improvement in a 20GWh battery gigafactory could save over ￡21 million a year and reduce raw material wastage, some of which are rare earth minerals.

The DigiTwin team will establish the feasibility of creating a digital twin of UKBIC to explore the effectiveness of CT scanning as an advanced analytical tool to identify, analyse and resolve quality defects much faster and more accurately than traditional inspection methods.'

Within the Energy Trilemma; this approach touches on affordability, security and sustainability.

1. Affordability: Improving yield is key to to bringing the energy technologies to higher maturity, from a manufacturing readiness perspective.
2. Security: Ensuring the future of safety, with new technologies, and use of raw materials is key to Batteries, Hydrogen and other Net Zero Technologies. We have already seen the challenges with Electric Vehicles being recalled due to battery fires.
3. Sustainability: The resources of these new technologies with rare earth materials, and the energy demands across the life-cycle are key.

Our understanding of how technologies will evolve, using digital engineering, digital manufacturing can speed up. We have seen this with the application in the pandemic, on programmes like the VentilatorChallengeUK , where the UK Government turned to industry to leverage industry, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult technologies to bring digital solutions to the fore to scale production in a medical regulatory environment, quality and data were key to solving this with digitalisation enablers.

So as we peer into the future, #Hydrogen as an energy carrier is another area, which with scaling electrolysis and fuel cell manufacturing, both will play a key role in achieving the goals of decarbonising the future of mobility, with green hydrogen - this too can benefit from the closed loop with a digital-twin to optimise the scale up efficiently, and safely.

We see already in the Hydrogen applications in regulated environments, of Aviation, significant work is underway with Airbus , Universal Hydrogen , ZeroAvia , Cranfield Aerospace Solutions and HyFlux all playing a part in the UK to developing this as a viable solution to zero emissions aviation.

We can now believe that this journey to advance towards a net-zero future is possible, and the optimisation of the scale-up of the manufacturing will be key, and we go beyond research aims where we see the feedback from the manufacturing environment assisting the design for manufacturing.

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