Public Funding for Baker Hughes Energy Technology UK Limited

To develop multiphysics modelling tools, skills, and technology and apply them to novel pipeline design, reducing material and mass whilst maintaining performance and structural integrity.

This project aim to develop a calibration method for quantitative dimensional evaluation of battery internal structure with XCT, in partnership with a research partner with metrology expertise. The outcome of the project is expected to make our solution of AI-powered analysis of XCT inspection more competitive, with the possibility to offer a tracible measurement accuracy to the customers of battery industry. The objectives of the project include: * To develop and produce a phantom with known calibrated defects and distance.(NPL) * To manufacture battery cell samples with the phantom insert, to get the scanning conditions as close to the real condition as possible. (UKBIC+Waygate) * To scan the samples with XCT to generate volumetric data, and analyze the XCT data to check /determine the deviation of scanned data from the calibration data. (Waygate +NPL+UKBIC) The deliverables will be a calibration method for the battery ADR software, which include: 1. The phantom to calibrate the ADR. 2. The evaluation process.

The emerging UK Battery Factories will need to compete for productivity with Global EV GigaFactories and to compete there is a key consideration for increasing the yield and getting to steady state quickly. The UK Battery Industrialisation Centre with Waygate Technologies and PXL-ICE believe that a digital twin of UKBIC linked to the physical manufacturing production lines at key process areas will improve these two factors and address the following issues: Current yields in EV Battery factories are typically as low as 75% initially, and with the use of a digital twin powered by data from Quality Gates using inspection technologies such as X-Ray CT, and Visual Cameras we believe this can be optimised and increased using a 'control tower' to manage and fuse data between quality gates. The establishment of the feasibility of this digital-twin and an IT/IS architecture is the deliverable of this project, and it is scoped with the intention to conduct the feasibility study over a 6 month period and, having established that the proposed solution does work, but outside the scope of this project, to build and implement this solution within a 12 month timescale. This project will align very well with the recent (July 2022) announcement of the partnership between UKBIC and Waygate Technologies. The fundamental deliverables of the project are to demonstrate that establishing a digital twin of UKBIC linked to key parameters in the battery manufacturing process will deliver the predicted improvement of higher yield and lower cost and the facilitation of a decision to move forward with the implementation of this solution in UKBIC which will be to the benefit of UKBIC's clients and wider industry as UKBIC fulfils its remit to provide the learning environment for the burgeoning UK battery manufacturing industry. It will also demonstrate the effectiveness of CT scanning as an advanced analytical tool to identify, analyse and resolve quality defects much faster and more accurately than traditional inspection methods.

Direct State of Health Measurement for Power Devices (DiSoHM) is a project which brings together academia and industry with the objective of developing an in-situ health monitoring device that is able to detect and quantify the health of a power electronics module. DiSoHM wil dramatically increase the availability of power electronics systems embedded in harsh environments such as off-shore facilities and sub-sea equipment. Electronics application used in such challenging envrionments incur extremely high maintenance costs due to their remote and difficult to access locations. A technology such as that which will be developed in this project will help to reduce the cost of breakdown maintenance by providing a failure prediction capability which can be used to schedule effective preventative maintenance. It is expected that this technology will find applicatinos in other areas where high availability is important, such as HVDC transmission, high-speed electric trains and aerospace.