How can the lithium battery industry use visual inspection systems to reduce costs and increase efficiency?

1. Hidden reefs and opportunities in the rapid development of the lithium battery industry

2022 is a key year for China's lithium battery industry chain to go global. For the first time, Chinese companies will enter the global market in the form of an industrial chain and embrace historic development opportunities.

On December 21, 2022, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the operating conditions of the national lithium-ion battery industry from January to October. According to information from industry standard announcement companies and research institutions, the total output of lithium-ion batteries in the country exceeded 580GWh from January to October, the installed capacity of power batteries was about 224GWh, and the export of lithium-ion battery products increased by 87% year-on-year.

Industry insiders said that the lithium-ion battery industry is still in the expansion stage. It is expected that the global new energy vehicle industry will continue to develop rapidly in the next decade, with a compound growth rate of more than 20%, which will drive the lithium-ion battery industry to continue to grow rapidly.

The entire lithium battery equipment industry is enjoying the benefits of the expansion of power battery production capacity and manufacturing upgrades. Lithium battery testing equipment companies should be wary of the four potential challenges behind the rapid growth of the industry:

· Market demand upgrades, large-scale expansion costs are high

As the market size of lithium batteries, especially power batteries, expands, the requirement for defect rate increases from ppm to ppb. At the same time, the "bottleneck" of upstream material costs forces lithium battery manufacturers to increase intelligent transformation and reduce costs.

Product safety places more stringent requirements on production

Due to the special characteristics of materials, structure and use, the production of lithium batteries requires higher safety requirements than general products. However, lithium battery products are diverse and have as many as 40 to 50 production processes. Manual operation often cannot significantly reduce product quality risks.

· The equipment vision system has high requirements on human-machine operation ability

There are many types of automation equipment used in lithium battery production lines, which often come from multiple equipment manufacturers. The visual systems they carry are generally developed to meet their specific needs. Therefore, the interface and operation logic presented to the staff by each device are different, making it difficult for the equipment to be put into production quickly and synchronously, and the threshold for use is extremely high.

· Equipment stability and intelligence are still difficult to achieve flexible expansion

The pace of new technological changes in the lithium battery industry is accelerating, and the update cycle is also being compressed. Production equipment needs to have a higher degree of intelligence and stability to be able to cope with changes in demand and help companies seize market opportunities. However, the manufacturing processes and equipment levels of domestic lithium battery manufacturers are uneven, and flexible production capacity still needs to be improved.

2. Vision Intelligent Manufacturing Testing Solution deeply covers the core process of lithium battery manufacturing and increases the production capacity of the entire line

In response to the above pain points, based on the machine vision technology accumulated over the years in the 3C industry, pharmaceutical industry and photovoltaic industry, combined with many years of experience in the research and development of visual components and visual systems, Vision can achieve rapid experience replication and shorten the project implementation cycle for the lithium battery industry with special materials, fast equipment production speed and extremely low production fault tolerance; for lithium battery visual inspection applications with high demand for incoming material positioning, dimension measurement, welding appearance inspection, etc., Vision's general intelligent vision development platform VisionBank AI has targeted and mature algorithm modules and cutting-edge deep learning technology, which can solve most difficult visual problems at low cost.

At present, Vision's lithium battery industry solutions have deeply covered the electrode manufacturing and battery cell manufacturing process segments. With professional optical imaging technology and AI algorithm capabilities, it enables the intelligent transformation of lithium battery industry customers' production lines quickly, accurately and steadily, achieving real cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

3. Four major pain points in the lithium battery industry are broken one by one, and Weishi Intelligent Manufacturing injects catalysts into enterprises to reduce costs and increase efficiency

In response to the problem of market demand upgrade and high cost of large-scale production expansion, the Vision solution can realize intelligent upgrade for multiple workstations in lithium battery production, which can improve the efficiency by 30 times compared with manual quality inspection; at the same time, it goes deep into the core process of lithium battery, efficiently matches the production rhythm, and deploys light weight, helping enterprises to improve production efficiency by at least 40% and increase the production capacity of the entire line. Ultimately, it can help customers improve production efficiency and ensure product delivery.

In response to the challenge of product safety putting forward more stringent requirements on production, VisionBank AI's excellent full-stack algorithm capabilities and low-threshold operation interface help lithium battery companies complete the triple guarantee of incoming material quality inspection + intelligent guidance + post-production inspection in multiple processes, comprehensively and quickly detect various product quality problems, and classify defective products in a timely manner, ensuring zero missed inspections and a defect detection rate of ≥99.5%, ultimately providing customers with triple testing guarantees to improve product consistency.

In response to the high requirements of human-machine operation capabilities of equipment vision systems, VisionBank AI general intelligent development platform adopts a modular, zero-code, intelligent, drag-and-drop development model, which greatly improves the efficiency of building visual applications. The operation interface is clear and easy to understand, which can help customers greatly reduce labor costs.

In view of the difficulty in achieving flexible expansion of production due to the stability and intelligence of equipment, Vision can provide flexible visual inspection solutions based on different production environments and process details, from visual components to system algorithms, integrated tuning, and real-time data feedback to maximize the value of human-machine collaboration. At the same time, VisionBank AI's small sample training, no training mode, deep learning cutting-edge algorithms, and intelligent iteration functions can greatly reduce the difficulty of future production changes for enterprises, and ultimately help customers optimize production processes and move towards smart factories.