Lead and lithium manufacturer the Sunlight Group has hailed technical cooperation across Europe’s battery sector as key to scaling up production on the continent.
Greece-based Sunlight pledged closer partnerships with industry, research and academia after hosting the eighth consortium meeting of BATTwin — a European-funded project — at its industrial complex in Xanthi from July 2-3.
BATTwin is dedicated to supporting Europe’s strategic shift toward energy sovereignty and to challenge Asian battery players’ dominance of the industry.
The latest consortium meeting focused on industrial scaling up of new production lines, which Sunlight said remains volatile, with initial scrap rates frequently reaching 15% to 30%.
As manufacturing defects are typically detected only during final testing phases, following production, substantial volumes of critical raw materials are routinely wasted, compromising both the financial viability and strategic security of Europe’s battery ecosystem, Sunlight said.
BATTwin is combating this vulnerability by creating a real-time ‘digital twin’ of factory cell production lines in Europe.
BATTwin is developing a novel multilevel digital twin platform towards zero-defect manufacturing in battery production. Solutions include using digital twins for modelling during the critical stages of electrode manufacturing, cell assembly and conditioning.
Sunlight said the approach is being tested in Greece and at Verkor’s gigafactory facilities in France.
As a key industrial anchor for the project, Sunlight said its Xanthi complex serves as a critical validation ground for technologies.
Spanning 90,000m2, with an annual capacity of 9GWh, the battery firm’s flagship automated facility is one of Europe’s most advanced manufacturing hubs. By providing a scaled, operational ecosystem, Sunlight said it offers the consortium the real-world data infrastructure required to train and validate complex predictive algorithms on a commercial scale across diverse cell geometries and chemistries.
The consortium partners were given technical tours of Sunlight’s automated cell production lines to align data integration protocols between the physical machinery and the BATTwin digital platform.
