Electric Vehicles (EV) have become the fastest-growing segment in the automobile industry. What distinguishes EVs from traditional vehicles is their batteries, which make them sustainable and free from the dependencies of fossil fuels. Globally in 2022, roughly one million EVs were sold each month, translating to around 500 million battery cells being manufactured and delivered monthly to EV production lines. Not only is battery manufacturing a high-volume, cost-competitive industry, but it is also one wherein quality standards are extremely high.
EV battery manufacturers face a variety of considerations. The battery largely determines the car’s range, charging time and price. Therefore, the battery pack needs to maintain consistent operations over a lifespan of at least 10 years. The residual performance of the battery also contributes significantly to the vehicle’s resale value. As the demand for safe, reliable and efficient batteries reaches historic levels, it’s given rise to advanced technologies to aid design and production, leading the industry to embrace the benefits of smart manufacturing.
Smart Manufacturing
The battery manufacturing process has rapidly moved from basic industrial into the high-tech category – adopting smart manufacturing technologies common in the development and production of silicon chips. Silicon chips have features measured in nanometers and multiple layers deposited using high-precision lithography techniques. EV battery cell features are not quite so small, but production is similarly complex. Cells are produced using ultra-thin coated foils built up over hundreds of layers. There are thousands of points of alignment and connectivity, small variations must be identified and every cell is digitally imaged with data retained for batch and quality tracking before dispatch.
At the core of smart manufacturing is the requirement to capture extensive data of all elements at every stage of production, including detailed information about every single finished product. Because this is a critical safety component, the data is usually archived for 10 or more years and can also be leveraged for quality control and innovation.
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- Quality Control. Some of the world’s largest battery manufacturers for EVs are now using high-resolution industrial camera vision and other sensor data (such as x-ray and ultrasonic) to inspect and record the production process in detail. These AI-enabled computer vision solutions can help optimize the process at each step and identify when they fail to meet quality constraints. This enables manufacturers to identify defects earlier in the process and discard components before incurring additional costs on the production line.
- Innovation. Small refinements in the process or changes in chemical compounds can result in substantial product improvement. Innovation is an iterative process. It is only through the detailed analysis of captured manufacturing data, by data scientists working closely with the R&D engineering teams, that we can realize these advancements. The magic happens with the close interaction between IT data analysis and operational technology (OT) teams. High-tech manufacturers must invest in technology to capture and leverage data to innovate. Companies that build data-driven analysis into their industrial processes are advancing progress beyond competitors who are only focused on volume and cost.
Scalable, Secure and Reliable Infrastructure
To fully realize the benefits of Industry 4.0 technology, manufacturers must consider certain dependencies. Video data and other telemetry captured during manufacturing requires low-latency multi-thread writes into high-capacity storage. This storage data lakehouse feeds advanced image analytics the data science team then uses. The AI / ML process requires GPU-accelerated multi-thread reads of unstructured data from the same storage. Shifting this data between storage at the manufacturing plant and the public cloud potentially introduces delays, increased cost and security concerns, so the infrastructure is typically co-located with the industrial facility. All of this requires highly reliable IT infrastructure, with the ability to provide continuous 24×7 operations, even during system expansion and upgrades. Perhaps most importantly, manufacturers must architect the need for intrinsic resilience against cyberattacks into the solution from the beginning. This is because the product lifecycle data being captured is of enormous commercial value to the manufacturer and their customers and represents a high-profile target for ransomware.
Dell Technologies is the leading vendor of storage for unstructured data – including scale-out File (PowerScale) and Object (ECS) storage1, 2 – and several industry-leading EV battery manufacturers have already adopted these products. With Dell consistently ranked as a leader in Gartner’s distributed file systems and object storage Magic Quadrant for the seventh year running3 and PowerScale being the world’s most flexible4 and secure5 scale-out NAS solution, our solutions are well-suited to meet the requirements for smart manufacturing to enable consistency, reliability, security and scalability for EV battery manufacturers.
1IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2022 Q3, Dec 2022– NAS Vendor Revenue.
2 IDC WW Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 1Q 2022, June 2022, #US48220321 – Object storage segment share #1.
3 Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage” by Julia Palmer, Jerry Rozeman, Chandra Mukhyala, Jeff Vogel, October 19, 2022.
4 Based on internal analysis of publicly available information sources, August 2021.
5 Based on Dell analysis comparing cyber-security software capabilities offered for Dell PowerScale vs. competitive products, September 2022.
