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As KORE Energy president Jay Bellows oversees the implementation of Honeywell’s end-to-end, built-in battery-manufacturing–excellence platform (Battery MXP) at KORE Energy’s KOREPlex gigafactory in Buckeye, Arizona, he’s targeted squarely on high quality, he informed EE Occasions. That, in fact, makes automation a star of the present.
In an effort to ship lithium-ion battery cells and modules for the e-mobility and energy-storage sectors, KOREPlex will come collectively in two tiers, achieved in two phases: The primary will convey capability of 6 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of product, and the second will add 9+ GWh of product. “So we’re taking a look at between 15 and 18 GWh in whole,” he mentioned.
Bellows’s group selected Honeywell’s Battery MXP, he mentioned, as a result of the corporate “brings to the desk an excessive degree of high quality capabilities. It will increase our timeliness of product to the market. Capability is restricted by the traces, not by something that Honeywell brings to it. Now, that being mentioned, the standard of the product will increase the worth to our clients. That’s what we’re in search of. Tremendous, tremendous prime quality—best-in-market merchandise, going out to our clients.”
High quality is measured by the product’s means to do what it’s alleged to do. “You’re taking a look at amp hour, density in batteries, the flexibility to carry out at C charges,” he mentioned. “It’s actually simply with the ability to carry out on the nameplate of the product. And the higher-quality parts you might have in that product, the extra it’s capable of just do that.”
For batteries, one of many greatest points is degradation: How lengthy can it cycle? How lengthy can it work? How lengthy will it final?
“These are all reliant on key parts within the batteries themselves,” Bellows mentioned. “In order pure as you may get electrolyte, anode and cathode to be, the higher the battery’s efficiency will in the end be.”
Automation is a ‘development course of’
Working by way of automation is “one of many development processes that we’re seeking to do as we enhance our capability and our means to get product into the grid,” he mentioned. “That’s one of many key parts in what we’re doing at KORE. We’re working actually arduous to ensure we convey home content material to the grid and clients right here in the USA.”
The automation facet of manufacturing between 15 and 18 GWh of capability “permits us to do it constantly, in a number of runs, and maintain the consistency of deliverables in place,” Bellows mentioned. “It’s going to guarantee that we hit our numbers.”
Feeling that “Honeywell has among the finest names” within the manufacturing business with regard to automation, he mentioned he expects the phases to unfold “in a well timed method.”
The MXP will probably be deployed within the first half of 2025: “We’d like it to be at first of Q1 of 2025, however realistically talking, it’s arduous to slim down that window as a result of there’s a lot occurring in that constructing,” Bellows mentioned. “We’re speaking about nicely over 1 million sq. ft, and there are lots of processes and procedures that go into deliverables on the utility degree, in addition to simply customary provide chain points” concerned in constructing a producing facility.
Honeywell’s system will ship distant visualization and management over operations, driving productiveness. It should, mentioned Chad Briggs, VP and GM of tasks and automation options for Honeywell Course of Options, additionally assist KOREPlex lower its carbon footprint.
Knowledge from the Nationwide Renewable Power Lab (NREL) means that the normal method of utilizing OEMs and inserting the assorted parts of a battery-manufacturing facility collectively finally ends up with a yield of about 70% at regular state, Briggs mentioned.
“Meaning 30% waste,” he added. “So from our perspective, there’s so much we will do to attempt to hyperlink these numerous steps collectively, together with the standard processes and measurements that we now have, with a view to enhance total yield, which decreases total value. In fact, all that waste comes from many alternative angles,” together with processing and mining for lithium ore, so bettering yield in manufacturing processes results in carbon-footprint reductions.
KOREPlex will probably be among the many first U.S. gigafactories constructed independently of an automotive OEM, enabling the ability to provide cells to a spread of consumers, together with e-mobility startups and utility clients looking for to enhance reliability with vitality storage, Honeywell famous. Honeywell Ventures is a co-investor in KORE Energy and took half in a funding spherical final November.
Life sciences noticed this MXP first
Honeywell’s MXP has been out within the wild for a bit longer than a yr.
The Charlotte, North Carolina–primarily based firm first noticed the necessity to conjoin in a typical platform conventional manufacturing-execution–system (MES) performance, high quality performance and distributed management functionalities within the life sciences.
“So we launched it there first, after which we introduced it over to the battery-manufacturing world,” Briggs mentioned, noting that the 2 disparate industries face “very related challenges: Every particular person cell has some degree of security and traceability that’s required to ensure that them to fulfill their wants, for instance.”
Honeywell helped Walvax Biotechnology enhance operations at its vaccine-production plant. “They’re utilizing it for very extremely digitized vaccine manufacturing,” he mentioned. “We deployed our batch-process management, our building-management answer and our energy-management and high quality packages there.”
Fixing many points without delay
In its work with KORE Energy, Briggs mentioned Honeywell targeted on this drawback set:
- Enhance high quality. Enhance first-pass yield and total throughput.
- Automate and cut back folks dependency. Transfer what had been lots of manufacturing performed in low-labor–value nations world wide, and significantly in China, to the U.S.—“the place automation needed to be at a a lot larger degree when it comes to the variety of folks we will afford on the ground.”
- Discover financial savings past reductions in folks depth.
- Uncover what might be performed within the ERP. “There have been components of an MES. There have been components of a distributed management system. However every a kind of individually appeared that it was a bit heavy and rigid. So we borrowed from related issues we have been fixing within the life-sciences house to herald extra versatile, light-weight merchandise that took one of the best, or at the least the wanted, items from all the others into what we now name a ‘Battery MXP.’”
Scalability is the important thing to Honeywell’s Battery MXP, he mentioned: “It gives seamless operation, which permits KORE to tug all the methods collectively for a real-time view of what’s taking place throughout the whole lot of the ability. That’s not solely giving machine visibility however even issues like incoming high quality. In some instances, we’re even taking a look at scanning incoming supplies in order that we now have materials high quality as acquired, materials high quality all through the preliminary formation of cathode anode and all through even battery formation and testing.”
