German engineering firm Dürr Systems has expanded its portfolio of two-sided simultaneous electrode coating machines with a new coater that uses Siemens technologies to support tension-controlled coating capabilities.
The company’s product is tailored to customers’ requirements for a complete electrode coating process that supports integrated solvent recovery and onsite refining along with state-of-the-art roll presses, said CTS Sales Director Jim Hartnett.
Dürr also offers Tandem Coater equipment with integrated solvent recovery. Dürr’s team assesses customers to recommend either Tandem or simultaneous two-sided coating machines to support their objectives.
“While the Tandem Coater remains the industry’s preferred means of battery electrode production and still a viable OEM option for our customers with many years left in its lifecycle, we wanted to leverage our engineering know-how from it to give our customers another way to elevate and expand their production,” Hartnett said. “Our R&D team went to work on completely rethinking our system’s architecture, with greater coating precision, quality, efficiency and sustainability as their design points.”
The Dürr GigaCoater has a straight-path product flow on a single coating station. Slot-die coating on a backing roll is immediately followed by a tensioned-web slot-die coating to coat both sides of the current collector in one pass. An air flotation dryer enables simultaneous two-sided coating as the foil runs through a non-contact drying process.
For help with automation and controls, especially motion control, Dürr chose Siemens partner and systems integrator DMC.
The GigaCoater’s automation and control system contains numerous Siemens components from its Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) portfolio. These include the SIMATIC S7-1500 Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), which oversee the two-sided simultaneous coating processes to precisely manage the movement, alignment, and timing of numerous servo motors as the copper foil substrate moves through the machine and its float-drying modules.
The SIMATIC HMI TP900 Comfort Panels provide a nine-inch diagonal touchscreen for operators to manage all steps in the coating and drying processes with complete visibility. And the SINAMICS S120 Drives offer integrated safety, energy savings and network connectivity for a wide range of power ratings.
The Siemens SIMATIC WinCC Unified System for HMI and SCADA programming acts as an integration platform to link data from production with a customer’s IT enterprise systems.
Dürr’s Business Development Director David Ventola considers the two-sided simultaneous electrode coating capabilities to be a game-changer for EV battery production. “It eliminates the vexing problem of edge curl with its float-drying process that dries both sides of the electrode at same time balancing the forces of both sides. There’s no edge curl even at high coating weights. That alone can enhance yields substantially to increase production outputs.”
The GigaCoater machine’s precise coating capabilities can help Dürr’s battery cell OEM customer achieve high-quality yields, while also reducing waste, labor and energy costs and saving plant space.
“We want to be able to use sophisticated 3D simulations in collaboration with our customer engineering teams to help them optimize all of these systems and save CAPEX, then simulate full production processes to reduce their OPEX even more,” Ventola said. “Eventually, we envision enabling our customers to use AI for monitoring production end-to-end and alerting operators when process anomalies occur, so they can investigate and prevent costly disruptions.”
Source: Dürr
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