Industrialization of Lithium-IonPrismatic Battery Cell for the Automotive Industry

Abstract: Energy systems in every part of the world are experiencing accelerated shifts towards more sustainable solutions which will bring far-reaching changes to our daily lives. These rapid transitions will bring impactful and vital changes to the way we fuel our cars, heat our homes and power our industries in the approaching decades. [1] The automotive sector is in high pace to electrify their cars. The number of electric passengercar sales is expected to increase by more than a factor of 60 between 2018 to 2050. Which means by that time there could be approximately 2 billion EVs on the roads and they all need batteries to run on. [1] ManyEuropean electric vehicle manufacturers have started marketing their future models globally, but automotiveli.-ion battery manufacturing capacity in Europe is merely 2.1% of the total global automotive li-ion batteryproduction. [2] Increase in sales of EV-s and energy storage systems drives the demand for li-ion batteries. This research is conducted in collaboration with Northvolt, one of the newcomers to the li-ion batterymanufacturing market in Europe. Northvolt is a Swedish-founded company in 2016, and despite its young age, Northvolt has prominent partners including BMW Group, Epiroc, Scania and the Volkswagen Group. Northvolt is with global ambition to produce the world's greenest battery cell with minimal possible carbon footprint in its Gigafactory in Sweden with 32GWh annual manufacturing capacity. Also, together with Volkswagen a 50/50 joint venture has been established to produce batteries in a 16GWh factory in Germany. After entering in different supplier agreements, Northvolt has sold a considerable amount of its first Gigafactory NV Ett production capacity to its key customers with a united equivalent of over $13billion until 2030. [3]Setting up lithium-ion battery factories for the automotive industry is a challenging task. It requires high speed and flexibility to keep up with the growing demand in a short time and still meeting all the stakeholder's requirements while keeping the highest environmental standards in place during production. To keep up with the growing demand and customer requirements a state-of.the-art industrialization project management strategy is developed. Therefore, state-of.the-art automotive project management, new product industrialization and development practices are investigated together with the best practices from the wider industry. Furthermore, Northvolt's current industrialization project management strategies are examined, and improvement proposals and tools are developed to ramp-up the current and future factories with shorter time, less cost and highest possible quality. The main aim of the thesis is to develop a project management solutions to lead industrialization of li-ionbattery Giga-factories successfully and help Northvolt fuel our cars, heat our homes, and power our industries more sustainably and innovatively. The expected outcome of the thesis is five tools developed that support the industrialization of LIB production facilities in Europe to increase the EU LIB manufacturing capacity.