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Laser Leader: TRUMPF is Building Better EV Batteries with 100 Years of Innovation

January 20, 2024

Here’s our latest EV supplier interview with TRUMPF:

  • Seyoung Baek – Global Industry & Business Development Manager / Mobility

  • Johannes Buehrle – Director of Industrial Mobility Business Development focused on Battery and Fuel Cell Manufacturing

  • Daniel Fuhrmann – Global Industry & Business Development Manager / Mobility

Can you talk about the history of TRUMPF?TRUMPF is now a 100-year-old company with over 18,000 employees and over 5 billion euros in revenue per year, and we’re very proud to be family-owned. We strongly believe that without shareholders, we’re able to push innovation and create products that the market truly needs. One of our strong points is our focus on R&D, typically with double-digit quotas.

Source: TRUMPF Group

Our specialty is industrial lasers with integrated optic and sensor technology. We offer comprehensive solutions, with our lasers incorporated into machines on the manufacturing line.

In the 80s, TRUMPF’s owner, Mr. Leibinger, pioneered the integration of a laser into a punching machine for cutting sheet metal. Despite skepticism due to the high costs and maintenance of lasers at that time, Mr. Leibinger’s vision paid off, marking the start of our laser division.

The initial focus was sheet metal manufacturing for small companies in our machine tool division. Companies use our machinery to create custom metal products based on external orders, without having their own proprietary products. The machine tool division continued evolving, dealing with larger volumes and batch sizes across various sectors, including clock, electronics, and automotive. A pivotal moment was about 15 years ago when Volkswagen began using laser brazing for body-in-white parts, pushing laser technology to automotive manufacturing. Following this, Mercedes started using lasers for remote welding, replacing traditional electrical resistance welds. Soon after, Asian automotive manufacturers adopted similar techniques.

We’ve maintained our leadership edge because we have industrial experts like Seyoung and Daniel on the team who have first-hand experience with our customers’ needs and challenges. They dive deeply into developing very specific applications, which allows us to tailor innovations to the precise requirements of our clients, reinforcing our position in laser technology.

Can you talk about some of the applications for TRUMPF lasers?

We’re a leading supplier of laser welding for battery production, which has 30 to 40 distinct laser applications on its own. Inside the pack, you not only have the modules, but electronics as well, requiring several welded connections. Then we have cooling plates and various mechanical structures, such as crash supports, which are integral components of the battery pack, especially in cell-to-pack approaches, where the battery pack is directly integrated into the vehicle’s structure.

Another significant application is hairpin welding, which is vital in electric motor construction.

We also engage in the hydrogen sector, contributing to bipolar plate welding.

What sets TRUMPF apart from the competition?TRUMPF stands out for a few reasons.

For one, we have a diverse lineup for EV powertrain manufacturing. We offer continuous wave (CW), short, and ultra-short pulse lasers, each with different wavelengths, beam qualities, and power levels. We’re able to cover the wide arrangement of needs in battery manufacturing, making us pretty unique, and our slogan, “the power of choice,” reflects that. There’s no universal laser solution; different applications require different lasers. TRUMPF’s wide range caters to all these needs.

We also produce our own optics and sensor systems and deeply understand each application. Our technical consultants and laser application centers (LAC) help customers find the best parameters for their projects.

Source: TRUMPF Group

We don’t just look at the immediate laser application; we consider what happens before and after the production process. This approach allows us to develop customized solutions combining lasers, optics, and sensors to suit each customer’s specific needs.

Source: TRUMPF Group

For example, in electric motor production, we’ve integrated AI filters and built-in cameras that enable precise welding, even if the customer’s production process has imperfections. This tells the machine where to weld, and on what parameters. The sensors not only monitor the entire process but also monitor the laser itself, these sensors can be combined with pre- and post-processes in the production line. The data is then stored and secured for traceability and quality assurance (more about this data below).

Additionally, our global presence with over 70 subsidiaries ensures consistent, high-quality support worldwide.

What does the initial consultation look like?It depends on the stage of production; the consultative aspect has a huge variance.

In the US and Europe, a lot of companies are either startups or just entering the EV industry. We’re involved very early in the design process helping answer questions such as what materials to use, what materials we can join, what geometries we suggest to make a laser joint, and what materials absorb a laser well for welding, cutting, marking, or surface treatment. They can answer these and many others in our labs, which saves them equipment investment. This allows for a first trial before setting up their own small lab. We also have universal machines that customers will purchase to build their prototypes before they talk to machine builders to ramp up production. We then supply the lasers, optics, sensors, etc. along the way.

On the other hand, countries such as Korea (where Seyoung is most experienced), typically have mature EV battery production lines in place, and they need very specific support to optimize their manufacturing lines.

This is what our experts do every day. Customers come into one of our worldwide application labs with their basic coupon material, and we run trials with basic clamping, then talk about what would be the best geometry to join these two materials, what would be the best alloy combination, and run trial and error until we can define the best solution. Customers have varying budgets, productivity targets, and cycle times and we help them define the entire process.

We eventually reach a point when the system integrator/machine builder combined into one, we all work together to find where the bottlenecks are in the process.

What are some of the recent innovations from TRUMPF?We believe customers are moving from rapid investment to meet demand in a copy-paste format, heading towards a more cautious investment strategy while focusing on improving quality, yield rate, productivity, and cost savings, which is an opportunity to develop mature manufacturing processes.

We’re working on a project to help a company replace > 10-year-old conventional processes which were a bottleneck to have better productivity in their lines for example.

We focus on continuous innovation and intensive research in the field of welding which is one of the core processes in battery manufacturing, because we know it’s directly related to quality and safety, these efforts will significantly contribute to building better batteries.

We can’t give the specifics, but we recently launched a tailored solution that decreased our customers’ failure rate by almost 50%, improving their yield to match these new market trends.

A couple of specific innovations:

Laser welding shapesAn important component of battery manufacturing is the repeatability of the welding. A battery pack can have several thousand welds because you have thousands of batteries, each needing its own contact. Every single contact needs to be repeatable and to achieve this, the process must reduce all the disturbances such as spatters, projections, contaminations, etc. To help this, we essentially form our laser beam in different shapes to avoid spatter and increase the mechanical resistance of the joint. Our laser shapes ensure a solid connection or a media-tight closing of a cell/pack.

Additionally, we developed a green laser wavelength for high absorption over highly reflective materials like copper, coupled with our own scanner optics.

VCSEL for electrode dryingToday’s electrode drying ovens have a massive footprint, imagine 100 meters of machinery with high operational cost because they use gas or electricity for the heat. To ease this problem, we developed what we call “VCSEL ” (vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser, pronounced vixel, like pixel), a laser used for electrode drying.

Source: TRUMPF Group

Typically, lasers are focused on a very small point to cut, weld, or mark, but in this case, we use the laser across a very large area using directed wavelength-selective infrared radiation to dry the electrode, saving energy and footprint in cell production. If you combine the ovens with VCSEL, we’ve found the potential for 60-80% footprint reduction, and lower capital expenses due to electrical consumption decrease.

Can you talk about TRUMPF lasers regarding Industry 4.0 and traceability?

TRUMPF’s products are tailored to industry 4.0, at gigafactory scale, with traceability at the forefront. Several Korean battery manufacturers are operating gigafactories using the Smart service solution from TRUMPF to their advantage.

We call it TruConnect, through the connectivity between all the lasers of all our customers’ production lines, it helps the customer maintain process information and laser status data precisely.

Source: TRUMPF Group

It is an intelligent service solution with a high degree of completeness even on large-scale production lines, comparable to a SCADA system.

Generally, we divide the data into two parts:

1 – Process data from the sensors. Elevation of the sensor data is pre-integrated within our systems, and the customer uses that for production analysis. It’s an important variable to control production. One example of process data is at the welding joint, you can combine data from an integrated camera with an AI filter to count the spatters. We can save all the data for every single weld like power, speed, etc. If there’s a recall down the road, the customer can trace the issue to find out what exactly was happening at that moment in production, allowing for changes to prevent it from happening again.

2 – Conditional data logs the state of the laser equipment for preventative maintenance. This detects if something is going wrong such as water leakage or other conditional issues that occur in manufacturing. We monitor thousands and thousands of lasers at the same time and process that within our monitoring center to predict and prevent future issues with the equipment.

If you think about gigafactory scale battery cell production, it’s a massive line, and anything to boost preventative maintenance helps prevent unexpected failures of the laser, decreasing customer risk and losses. We apply all this variable data to ensure product quality and traceability in the event a defect is found down the road.

Anything else to add?

The current wave of electrification is big, but it could be, and hopefully will be, bigger. One of the biggest hurdles is the cost, a lot of which is attributed to the battery pack of EVs. TRUMPF’s laser innovations can be a key element in increasing cell manufacturing agility, yield, speed, and quality, which will enable lower costs for consumers and push the market forward.

Our unrivaled solution portfolio gives us the capability to improve the entire battery manufacturing process, and that’s our strong point. We have the capabilities to solve your challenges and prepare the products you need in the future. That’s why TRUMPF is the preferred laser supplier for global battery manufacturers.

Special thanks to Seyoung, Johannes, and Daniel for the great interview!