Benefiting from the rapid development of new energy vehicles, the demand for power batteries and energy storage batteries has exploded, and the promotion of new battery technologies such as 4680 has led to a continuous increase in the production capacity of various lithium battery terminals in China, with the production capacity of many battery companies exceeding 200GWh.
With the large-scale manufacturing of power batteries, battery companies are placing increasingly stringent demands on areas such as detection accuracy, detection speed, image transmission, and defect analysis. The continuous upgrading of manufacturing process innovation and new demands for defect detection are bringing tremendous development opportunities to machine vision companies with core competitiveness.
On the other hand, companies are actively exploring new technological routes and processes and are transforming into smart factories in order to focus on key competitive factors such as battery capacity and range, process quality and safety, production efficiency and manufacturing costs.
This makes the visual inspection scenarios for lithium batteries increasingly complex and sophisticated, requiring a deep understanding and rapid response to various complex application scenarios, production processes, and customer concerns.
As the next blue ocean market for machine vision applications, more and more machine vision manufacturers are accelerating their entry into the lithium battery sector, and market competition is intensifying.
Technological R&D potential, product iteration capabilities, and overall solution capabilities have become core factors for battery companies when choosing machine vision brands.
Currently, the machine vision track in my country's lithium battery industry exhibits the following characteristics and trends:
1. State-owned brands are gradually growing stronger, and domestic substitution is accelerating.
Domestic machine vision companies can leverage their closer proximity to technology users and their flexible service capabilities to promote the localization of core machine vision components in downstream sectors.
2. Machine vision underlying algorithms have become the core barrier to entry.
Domestic companies have made significant breakthroughs in hardware, but currently only a few possess independent underlying algorithm libraries. Having independent intellectual property rights for underlying algorithms and AI/deep learning capabilities will become one of the core competitive advantages for machine vision companies.
3.3D vision is rapidly gaining traction, becoming a powerful complement to 2D vision.
Battery companies are demanding increasingly stringent requirements for machine vision in terms of detection accuracy, speed, image transmission, and defect analysis. 3D vision, by adding depth information of physical space to the traditional 2D vision, has entered a period of large-scale adoption in the power battery field.
4. The ability to conduct inspections throughout the entire process has become a competitive advantage.
The lithium battery production process is quite complex. A full-process visual inspection solution requires relevant companies to have a deep understanding of lithium battery manufacturing processes, diverse inspection scenarios, and actual inspection needs, as well as a wealth of know-how.
Taking square wound battery cells as an example, in the front-end process of battery cells, visual inspection is mainly used for coating correction and size measurement, surface defect detection and size measurement of electrode sheets, and winding alignment.
In the post-processing of battery cells, visual inspection is mainly used for bare cell tab folding inspection, tab cutting debris inspection, tab welding quality inspection, size measurement, adhesive positioning, as well as casing top cover welding quality inspection, sealing nail welding quality inspection, and battery cell appearance inspection.
In the module and PACK sections, visual inspection equipment is the mainstay, primarily used for bottom blue glue inspection, BUSBAR weld inspection, side weld inspection, full-size module inspection, and PACK inspection.
