As an R&D person it’s easy to get tunnel vision on a single process in the lab and obsess over optimizing it. How perfect can you make something one time? But cell manufacturing doesn’t care about your one perfect coin cell. It’s about how perfect you can make something over and over and over again. That’s the difference between science and production: repeatability.
Every step in battery manufacturing has tolerances, and those tolerances make or break yield. How much electrode misalignment can you tolerate before lithium plating starts sneaking in? How much coat weight variation will quietly lower your energy density or trigger safety risks later? This is the engineering skillset we have to grow domestically: not just chemistry, but cell engineering: the ability to build quality, consistently.
By the time a cell reaches formation cycling, it’s already racked up costs in materials, labor, and process time. A gigafactory wants to spot a dud before paying extra (energy costs) to charge and discharge it. Formation is expensive!
For those of you that don’t know: formation is the first few charge and discharge cycles that prepare a cell for the rest of its life. Think of it like Kindergarten. The real world (a.k.a. your EV pack) is High School. Formation is where cells learn to behave: form their SEI layer, establish capacity, and prove they’re ready for the big leagues. It’s also when you find out who’s not making it past recess. Cells with lower capacities or poor efficiencies get held back, or binned by performance. The underachievers don’t graduate to the next stage of manufacturing.
The Real Engineering Challenge
In research, you optimize. In manufacturing, you stabilize. It’s less about squeezing out one extra milliamp-hour and more about locking down your process so tightly that a Tuesday morning electrode looks identical to a Thursday night one.
That’s cell engineering, the lost art we need to rebuild domestically. It’s part chemistry, part mechanical, part data science, and part sheer grit. It’s how you go from a grad student’s three good cells to a factory’s three million.
Cell engineering: when everything goes well, sparks don’t fly. And if they do 🔥, congratulations you just invented a recall.
Some Resources We Love:
If you are interested in cell manufacturing and quality control this webinar is happening TODAY at 3pm EST| 1pm PST
This paper on quality control on cell manufacturing quality control is dense but in a gorgeous way, tons of information on non-destructive cell testing during manufacturing
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