E-Mobility Engineering 019 | In conversation: Stephen Lambert l WAE EVR l Battery case materials focus l Quality control insight l Clipper Automotive Clipper Cab digest l Optimising battery chemistries insight l Powertrain testing focus

50 May/June 2023 | E-Mobility Engineering Vantage began r&d work 8 years ago on non-contact methods of measuring battery trays, and assembled batteries using flexible 3D scanning. Its Part to 3D system now enables manufacturers to turn an entire battery assembly, tray or packs, into a CAD model in under 60 seconds, says White. The system allows measurement of more than 250 points using software with which surfaces and request measurements can be obtained, then automatically send the measurement data to a factory information system. Information technology is central toQC in factory environments, and Rockwell offers software-as-a-service from its Plex subsidiary. The Plex QualityManagement Systemhelpsmanufacturers generate process control plans with detailed inspection instructions and digital check sheets that are closely integratedwith product specifications. Scheider says, “You can manage and track documents, such as engineering and material specifications, to maintain a detailed list of compliance requirements, and regulatory compliance is supported easily across workflows.” Development at Omron is driven by what it calls its 5-Zero philosophy, which aims at incrementally reducing five undesirable things to zero, namely equipment downtime, design constraints, wasted worker time, and false failures and defects. The company is introducing more AI and deep learning capabilities to support inspection. “These tools are making decisions, using real data, not only to improve the inspection approach, better detect defects and improve product quality, but also reduce programming time and skill-level requirements as well as operator time,” say Murakami and Ward. It’s clear that automotive QC is going through a major transition as it adapts to large-scale manufacture of BEVs and hybrids, and the trend in the number of problems per 100 vehicles reported will be an important indicator of its progress. Inspection-friendly design Given the growing significance of non- contact QC inspection technologies, it is worth designing EV components with them inmind, White argues. For example, body panels and large-scale structural castings would greatly benefit from sets of datumpoints that can be located reliably using such technologies, he says. With traditional contact-based measurement methods, it was typically essential to locate datum structures by, for example, clamping them to pins. Now, however, with non-contact systems these datums can be measured using non-contact sensors to establish a coordinate frame. “If designers were considering this in defining their coordinate frame at the design level, the correlation and reliability of measurement could be greatly improved in many cases,” White says. At the systems level, improving ease of inspection starts in product life cyclemanagement, which Scheider characterises as ‘the single version of truth’ for themaster bill of materials. The process continues downstreamwhen data gathered by themanufacturing execution system is processed to find the root cause of any failures during testing. Third, with reference to BEVs in particular, the battery passport concept, when realised, will provide a full genealogy of rawmaterials and their transformation. “With that, quality engineers will have a gold mine of data to explore and, in addition to the well- known quality approaches, AI will be part of the solution to establish the best models,” Scheider says. In the meantime, the evolution of QC measurement and inspection instruments continues. Renishaw, for example, which invented the original touch trigger probe for CMMs in the 1970s, recently introduced its REVO five-axis measuring head for them. This captures data at measuring tip speeds of up to 500 mm/s, a major improvement over three-axis machines that commonly achieve 10-20 mm/s, he says, along with a multi-sensor flexibility that was not previously available. It can, for example, automatically switch to a roughness sensor housed in a change rack on the machine. Another trend is towards replacing many single-purpose ‘hard’ measuring instruments with reprogrammable devices such as Renishaw’s Equator flexible gauge, a factory floor tabletop instrument designed tomeasure parts of many different sizes and shapes over a wide range of temperatures. Equator uses a contact probe system that is calibrated and temperature-compensated using a ‘goldenmaster’ component. Insight | Quality control Machine learning as a service for acquiring and analysing data is intended to generate information such as the condition of the battery or power electronics for QC and so on (Courtesy of Porsche)