DigiTwin - Digital Twin for Quality and Yield Improvement of Battery GigaFactory

The emerging UK Battery Factories will need to compete for productivity with Global EV GigaFactories and to compete there is a key consideration for increasing the yield and getting to steady state quickly. The UK Battery Industrialisation Centre with Waygate Technologies and PXL-ICE believe that a digital twin of UKBIC linked to the physical manufacturing production lines at key process areas will improve these two factors and address the following issues:

Current yields in EV Battery factories are typically as low as 75% initially, and with the use of a digital twin powered by data from Quality Gates using inspection technologies such as X-Ray CT, and Visual Cameras we believe this can be optimised and increased using a 'control tower' to manage and fuse data between quality gates.

The establishment of the feasibility of this digital-twin and an IT/IS architecture is the deliverable of this project, and it is scoped with the intention to conduct the feasibility study over a 6 month period and, having established that the proposed solution does work, but outside the scope of this project, to build and implement this solution within a 12 month timescale. This project will align very well with the recent (July 2022) announcement of the partnership between UKBIC and Waygate Technologies.

The fundamental deliverables of the project are to demonstrate that establishing a digital twin of UKBIC linked to key parameters in the battery manufacturing process will deliver the predicted improvement of higher yield and lower cost and the facilitation of a decision to move forward with the implementation of this solution in UKBIC which will be to the benefit of UKBIC's clients and wider industry as UKBIC fulfils its remit to provide the learning environment for the burgeoning UK battery manufacturing industry. It will also demonstrate 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.