In Lithium battery manufacturing business the scrap rate, manpower and plant dimension affect directly the OPEX so then the cost per kWh produced.
Equipment have a main role on OPEX and CAPEX!
In the last 10 years we haven’t seen big improvement and development in term of equipment. The machines throughput on different manufacturing process are more or less the same:
- the first reason was the lithium battery manufacturing industry was not a predominant business but was a very risky and high cost business.
- there was not the needs to produce huge quantity of batteries per day
- most of lithium battery manufacturing plant were established in Asia where the labour cost is cheap so the automation level of battery equipment was not an important KPI
- many lithium battery manufacturing equipment, suppliers especially for cell assembly, cell finishing started with this business. They didn’t have any background experience in other industries where the automation technology was already able to garantee high throughput (hundreds or even thousands parts per minute).
Recently, with the huge investment and the big interest from media, industries, governments and business man, other companies, coming from Pharma, Tobacco and Paper industry decided to join in the lithium battery equipment business pushing even the existing player making development and raising the technology level.
Currently just WuXi Lead Intelligent is able to provide a full turnkey solution line, others like Manz, Yinghè etc are able to cover dedicated area in the manufacturing process. There are even some cases of company with a huge expertise in one single lithium battery equipment, like for example:
- KOEM – Winding machine
- BAESOL – Mechanical Notching machine
- COMEXI – Slitting machine
- Buhler – Mixing machine
Below you can find a qualitative distribution of lithium battery equipment supplier based on technology, you can find more details and the full list of more than 60 equipment suppliers in our report.
The recent forecasts show a huge demand of lithium battery equipment in the next years, demand which the current players in the supply chain are not able to satisfy.
A deep dive into the market trends data are available in our full report “Lithium battery equipment – Everything you should now“ (click on the link) where you can find all data and value for each manufacturing process and equipment.
How is important the machine throughput?
First of all the machine throughput affect the number of units/machine needed to achieve the target production capacity in the lithium battery manufacturing plant. There are some real cases as:
- Z folding machine
- Winding machine
Which represent a real bottleneck. Indeed as you can see in the picture below extract from our “lithium battery equipment report“, (click on the link if you want to know more) these two technologies required several machine to garantee the final production capacity, the number of units define even:
- the production space (dry room dimension) which has an important impact on CAPEX and OPEX;
- the FTE (full time employee) needed to run the machines which is another KPI for OPEX
Each equipment and process has different limiting factors. The equipment suppliers target is to develop solution able to remove this constraints allowing higher machine throughput and OEE. Just to make an examples, some limiting factors are:
- Web material acceleration and deceleration in winding machine
- Reel changeover in many different equipment
- The automation concept in some cell assembly equipment units
- Filling time
- Material Handling
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Each equipment maker has a different technology which can garantee different machine throughput and performance even in term of output product quality. The lithium battery equipment supplier location, the technology and other factors affect the final price of the equipment.