You may have never given a second thought to the battery inside your device until it starts demanding charging a bit too often, but the manufacturing process that each one undergoes is quite fascinating.
Myself and 10 other guests spent a few hours at Taiding, Ecovacs’ battery factory arm in Nanxun, China. It’s a massive operation that sits on a facility spanning 19.4 acres and reportedly cost 1.2 billion RMB to build.
A fully automated battery factory
The production line we walked was 300 metres long, and on the day it was producing 12 batteries every minute, with a maximum speed of 24 per minute, but that’s not even the biggest line in the building.
Every single one of these 12 batteries a minute is destined for a specific device – it’s incredible to think that each one might end up in a vacuum, a mower, or a handheld device. Running the line for a full day would result in over 17,000 batteries.
The scale explains how companies can fit devices with quality batteries while keeping costs low, and in Ecovacs’ case, the vertical integration means reduced markup on the final product.
Taiding’s battery factory process is mostly automated, and throughout the cell production process, there are only a few workers who monitor machines while robots do the heavy lifting. That helps to keep the process consistent and repeatable.
A final inspection and packaging is carried out manually at the end of the process.
Raw material to finished battery
The raw materials for these batteries is mixed automatically in huge vats, becoming a paste that’s spread onto the cathode and anode materials – copper and aluminum foils.
Once these are compressed and cut to size and shape, they are wound into a spiral that forms the core of the most common battery cells we see today. The core is finished and welded, then wrapped in the exterior pouch.
Each battery is thoroughly dried in an oven, then filled with electrolyte, left to age, and then slowly charged to activate the cell. It’s stored for a few days at 45 degrees Celsius to stabilise the internal layers, then a few more days at 23 degrees Celsius before it’s tested and graded.
Cells that pass testing are stored in a massive warehouse space with vertical storage that extends nearly out of view. Once they’re ordered, they are picked off by an automatic management system and sent for manual packaging to be sold to the next business in the chain.
Not every battery makes it out
The batteries are tested for capability and safety at critical stages of the process. Any that don’t meet the stringent requirements are picked off the line before they reach the next step.
Batteries that don’t pass testing don’t leave the battery factory, and the most obvious sign can be seen in the trays of finished cells with gaps in them; empty slots where a battery has been pulled off the line.
Of the trays I photographed, most were only missing around 10 batteries out of 240 slots in the tray.
More than just robot vacuums
Taiding produces batteries of all sorts on its production lines. The factory can produce pouch cells in a variety of shapes and sizes to suit different electronics.
Taiding supplies battery and power management systems destined for cleaning robots as well as electric scooters, solar street lights, power tools, and other smart home products.
Production consistency and quality is paramount to ensure a safe and reliable battery that lasts for years to come with fast charging capability and a long runtime.
It’s pretty amazing to think that so many of the devices we’ve come to rely on start from a factory like this, and the sheer number of steps they go through before reaching our hands.
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