Welding Challenges and Quality Assurance in Electric Vehicle Battery Pack Manufacturing

Abstract

Electric vehicles’ batteries, referred to as Battery Packs (BPs), are composed of interconnected battery cells and modules. The utilisation of different materials, configurations, and welding processes forms a plethora of different applications. This level of diversity along with the low maturity of welding designs and the lack of standardisation result in great variations in the mechanical and electrical quality of the joints. Moreover, the high-volume production requirements, meaning the high number of joints per module/BP, increase the absolute number of defects. The first part of this study focuses on associating the challenges of welding application in battery assembly with the key performance indicators of the joints. The second part reviews the existing methods for quality assurance which concerns the joining of battery cells and busbars. Additionally, the second part of this paper identifies the general trends and the research gaps for the most widely adopted welding methods in this domain, while it renders the future directions.