E-Mobility:
Challenges Overcome With X-Ray Tomography
The needs for electric drives are evolving as the push towards e-mobility continues. Cleaner transportation is still a top priority for governments and public institutions, and e-mobility options are becoming more popular. NEVs (new electric vehicles) open up new possibilities for environmentally friendly and low-emission transportation.
New Electric Vehicles components
The e-mobility sector faces numerous obstacles, including increased range, lower costs, and higher safety.
A solution is provided by X-ray CT scanning, which insures that every element of e-mobility is carefully inspected and analyzed. It is possible to spot defects and precisely measure them with a 3D view of the external and internal structures of parts. As a result, it lessens the need for expensive repairs and enables early problem detection prior to launch.
At every stage of the product life cycle, the main components of e-mobility—batteries, fuel cells, electric motors, power electronics, and many others—require high-quality inspections.
3 Challenges Encountered
The key challenges with e-mobility technologies are range extension, cost reduction, and safety enhancement. Using X-ray computed tomography, these three problems can be resolved.
Challenge 1
Range Extension
The term "range" describes how far an electric vehicle can go before needing to recharge its battery. A conventional internal combustion engine's range is roughly equivalent to that of an FCEV.
Since the charging infrastructure is expanding quickly and battery performance has significantly improved over the past ten years and is still undergoing significant R&D investments, "range anxiety" is no longer a problem with electric vehicles.
Challenge 2
Cost Reduction
Batteries in particular are expensive to create and recycle, which makes electric technologies remain pricey. Growth in the e-mobility market has to do with a decline in the cost of e-technologies.
By shortening the time to market and enhancing battery performance, X-ray CT technology keeps up with the market's development. Another advantage of X-ray CT is the decrease of waste due to the non-destructive identification of entire batteries that can be sold instead of being destroyed.
Making the switch to electric vehicles can result in huge savings. Since electric vehicles have fewer mechanical elements that are prone to failure and frequently provide better data to enable preventive maintenance, they are in fact more reliable than internal combustion engine vehicles, which results in lower maintenance costs.
Challenge 3
Safety Enhancement
Early defect discovery will help you prevent warranty and reclamation problems as well as potential market reputation problems. By creating your product of the best quality and lowering maintenance and error proneness, you also boost safety.
During the production process, structural faults including cracks, porosities, and inclusions can be found through non-destructive testing. Investigation of these faults exposes important physical characteristics that are damaging to the component's quality and performance.
New Electric Vehicles components
The five key NEV components—batteries, fuel cells, electric motors, electric drive trains, and power electronics—are very different from combustion engines.
With deep insights for quality assurance to ensure the dependability, effectiveness, and safety of your NEVs, RX Solutions' X-ray CT portfolio offers the ideal solution for each of these components. X-ray CT adds a lot of value to your supply chain for each of these components.
Component 1
Batteries
For EVs to operate effectively and be useful on a daily basis, batteries are a crucial component. Optimize your battery use. It is also the most costly component. A price-competitive electric car must first and foremost be designed well while keeping costs under control, as the material and production costs associated with making an EV battery make for a significant portion of the vehicle's total cost.
While lithium-ion technology is currently set to be the industry standard for all-electric vehicles, the technology solid-state batteries appear to be the future of long-range batteries. This technology will increase the stability and storage capacity of the lithium-ion cells. Another technology that is receiving significant R&D funding is the hydrogen fuel cell.
X-ray Computed Tomography (CT), specifically X-ray Nano-tomography (Nano-CT), takes a big part of the advancement of technology. Both ex-situ analyses on an inert sample and in-situ tests have been successfully conducted using laboratory microtomography to analyze the 3D microstructure in Li-ion cells with silicon electrodes. With the help of this innovation, research facilities and laboratories can greatly speed up their development and research.
As a non-destructive technology, x-rays provide a way to examine the internal and external structures of electrodes, membranes, or even an entire battery assembly without causing any damage to the component.
New battery technology development and adoption are accelerated by non-destructive technology like X-ray CT. As a result, it helps to bring down the price of e-transportation technology.
The creation and optimization of new batteries to the final assembly line can all be supported by X-ray inspection to ensure the release of a flawless stack.
Component 2
Fuel Cells
Instead of burning fuel, a fuel cell produces energy through an electrochemical reaction. As long as fuel is present, it functions like batteries, generating heat and electricity. In order to power the electric motor, H2 and air are mixed.
The fuel cell system of a fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) supplies all the energy required to run the electric motor. Before being put on the market, X-ray CT helps ensure the safety of fuel-cell technology by providing a thorough examination of the FCEVs' primary components. For R&D improvements of existing technologies as well as inspection directly on FCEV production lines, X-ray Micro-CT and Nano-CT are particularly effective technologies.
The key component is the fuel cell stack. Engineers layer fuel cells by bipolar plates since a single one only produces a modest amount of power. A full stack may accommodate up to 400 fuel cells in a passenger automobile. The number of stacks can be raised to meet increasing power needs.
The manufacturing of fuel cells is highly complicated because it must always adhere to reliability and safety standards. It is difficult to manufacture a system as sophisticated as a fuel-cell stack on a large scale. The efficiency of each fuel cell stack must be excellent. As a non-destructive technology, X-ray CT can be added to the FCEV manufacturing process at any stage of its life cycle.
You can utilize X-ray CT for fuel cells in each phase as follows:
› Internal electrode microstructure can be visualized in 3D using nano tomography, which allows for a deep analysis of the behavior.
› Control and non-destructive inspection of the entire H2 tank system is a must because the product is made to store hydrogen under high pressure, making quality control a priority.
› Composite analysis to check for flaws, delaminations, and porosities at the deepest level as they can reduce the reliability of the tanks.
Component 3
Electric Motor
The hairpin conception has evolved from earlier generations thanks to current technologies. Current electric vehicles entirely replaced traditional round-wire windings with hairpin stators. These high-precision hairpins provide improved performance, uninterrupted power flow, and excellent reproducibility.
Electric motor manufacturers work to achieve the maximum conductivity possible, which depends on hairpin welding quality with minimal porosity at critical points. The use of an X-ray CT hairpin inspection can be advantageous on a number of levels, including the evaluation of the hairpin's precise positioning, welding points' geometry and distances, the detection of internal voids and porosities that might impair the electrical current, and the general hairpin position in relation to the stator.
Due to the fact that welding on hairpins is done after assembly and that the housing is always scanned together with the hairpins, hairpin X-ray CT inspection is not as simple as it first appears.
The housing is a large, challenging-to-scan component that can introduce several artifacts during the hairpin scan.
A non-destructive method of precisely inspecting hairpins and automatically searching for porosities and faults inside the welding seam is inline X-ray CT inspection.
Electric motors are prone to severe wear, which typically results in expensive repair and maintenance expenditures. You can examine the interior of your electric motors using X-ray CT to forecast their breakdown early enough to perform preventive maintenance.
Component 4
Electric Drivetrains
Electric drivetrains come in a variety of designs, from two driven wheels to four driven wheels, with motors ranging from one to four, as well as inverters and dynamometers. They are utilized in vehicles of all sizes. To be able to deliver enough performance throughout the vehicle's lifetime and achieve the quality criteria set by the car manufacturer, this complex assembly needs to be very accurate and reliable.
With X-ray CT, components and sub-assemblies can be thoroughly inspected to increase their efficiency and reliability.
Component 5
Power Electronics
Tomography is a robust technique that has a wide range of uses, including dimensional measurements, assembly inspection, and material analysis.
High-resolution tomography enables interior component inspection in the context of failure analysis for embedded electronics without running the risk of further harm to the problematic component (which could result in damage or loss of parts crucial to the conclusion).
Despite the large size of the part to be analyzed, equipment like the EasyTom CT portfolio from RX Solutions enables users to work easily at several scales, going from a global observation of the component to a very high resolution targeted analysis. This makes it a tool of choice for failure analysis in embedded electronics.
Benefits of Using X-Ray CT to Inspect EVs Components
› From an individual part to an entire assembly
› A method that can be applied at every stage of the life cycle of your products
› A more thorough examination of hydrogen components for both internal and external structures.
› A single scan for a variety of analyses of all kinds
› Easy automated processes, including simple duplication of studies over periodic object structures.
› Costs and times for inspections are dramatically decreased.
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