In 2022 the global power battery and energy storage battery shipments amounted to 812GWh, an increase of 86% year-on-year. 2022 China's lithium-ion battery production amounted to 750GWh, an increase of more than 130% year-on-year, the industry's total output value exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan. In 2022 the global power battery installed TOP10 camp, Chinese enterprises still firmly occupy six seats, China in the global electric vehicle power battery market continues to maintain the leading level.
Currently in the field of new energy battery welding processing mainly includes blade lithium battery welding, cylindrical lithium battery welding, square shell lithium battery welding, soft pack lithium battery welding and hydrogen fuel cell welding.
Power battery is also a whole complex system, from the core, battery module, battery pack, through a manufacturing process, and finally assembled into a whole power battery system. Among them, the connection of material and material, module and module, and battery pack structure involves a highly demanding welding process - laser welding.
Although laser welding technology has been widely used in power batteries, but there are still some urgent challenges to overcome, including: copper welding has a bad appearance, spatter, false welding; aluminum welding there are fried holes, spatter, as well as the battery manufacturing capacity continues to improve, the existing process of laser welding speed needs to be improved and other issues.
At present, the global new energy automobile industry has entered a new stage of accelerated development, power battery technology innovation, quality performance and other higher requirements. Next, the power battery industry will enter a new stage from "there is no" to "good". The first half of the power battery industry can already meet the basic needs of the market. The second half of the power battery industry, is to lead the market demand, from there to good, with the industry to the new stage of high-quality leap development.
To achieve high standards in the production of power battery manufacturing, both lithium process itself or laser application landing there are many urgent problems: power battery quality standard requirements, process diversification, new technology iteration fast, battery product diversification, etc., have brought many challenges to the battery production. In the laser application landing process, consistency, stability, efficiency, precision and other requirements are also high process difficulties.
To the domestic laser new energy sector contact with a battery cell welding project, for example, due to the very complex structure of the workpiece, copper foil single layer of only 6μ, while the number of layers but a total of 93 layers, welding needs to be stacked on top of each other, and then welded on the battery cover.
Because of its complex structure, traditional laser welding is prone to large spatters and foreign objects such as blown spots and sharp objects, and it is difficult to achieve a consistent surface effect. Foreign matter is very easy to cause puncture of the blue film abnormality, which leads to high temperature heating in the battery discharge process, and in serious cases, may cause battery explosion, which requires a more advanced laser welding process to complete this difficult welding needs.
With the application of laser technology in industrial manufacturing is becoming more and more popular, more and more important, laser processing equipment has not only as a stand-alone operation of industrial machines, but also to integrate the whole line, the integration of advanced intelligent manufacturing, digital technology as a whole solution. Therefore, with the continuous development of laser technology, continuous absorption, integration of advanced intelligent manufacturing technology, will be a powerful boost to the industrial manufacturing industry to digitalization, intelligent development.
In the power battery laser welding application, the domestic laser new energy sector is also actively promoting its move towards digitalization and intelligence. After receiving new project requirements, it will first develop a feasible laser program, followed by the completion of possibly hundreds of tests within the configuration. For example, when doing Busbar welding for a head energy enterprise, it is necessary to complete tests on different material thicknesses, alignment and density, speed, power, shielding gas, working spot size, defocus, gap, melting depth limit, etc.; what kind of lasers are used for different application scenarios (e.g., power batteries and storage batteries) need to be accomplished one by one: the process of proposing ideas and experimental verification.
Each DOE test process for customers is also in the process of enriching the process database, the subsequent customers in the relevant laser welding applications, can be quickly matched to the appropriate program from the rich database.
With the expansion of the power battery market and industry scale, as well as the industry's high-quality development of the battery requirements to improve the efficiency of laser welding and process level, to promote laser manufacturing to the direction of digitalization, intelligent development will be the general trend, laser technology as a modern advanced manufacturing technology will be from the traditional "metal hard tool" to the "laser digital tool" to the "laser digital tool" to the traditional "metal hard tool" to the "laser digital tool" to the "laser digital tool" to the "laser digital tool". Laser technology as a modern advanced manufacturing technology will also be from the traditional "metal hard tool" to "laser digital tool" transformation, and become the key "weapon" of China's manufacturing lane change!
