RWTH Chair of PEM cooperates with Chinese plant manufacturer HYNN

In order to work together with PEM, HYNN, a specialist for post-processing in electric vehicle battery cell production, will in future operate a site at PEM’s Aachen headquarters Avantis on the German-Dutch border. Product development and prototype testing for various forming systems and comparable machines from battery cell production will be driven forward there. “As one of the most time-consuming and energy-intensive process steps, forming is still one of the biggest challenges in the industrial production of lithium-ion batteries,” says Professor Achim Kampker, Head of PEM.

Among other things, the collaboration is intended to generate ideas for research proposals and their implementation. To this end, HYNN intends to make prototype and industrialised systems available at the PEM Chair in future, which will also be used in teaching to familiarise students with theoretical content and offer them practical final theses and teaching modules.

PEM also intends to expand its long-standing collaboration with the Bielefeld-based mechanical engineering specialist BST. The focus here is on innovative process technologies in the production of batteries, fuel cells and electrolysers. To this end, both partners have signed a letter of intent for several project areas.

“The industrialization of production is one of the major tasks for a widespread establishment of battery and fuel cell technologies,” said PEM Director Professor Achim Kampker. For this reason, the two partners want to work together on different aspects of development, such as the potential transferability of innovations from battery production to fuel cell production and the industrialisation of “smart data” approaches. The partners could also work together in future on sub-processes in the drying of battery electrodes, on certain parameters in fuel cell and electrolyser production and on alternative membrane materials and their coating.

Both partners have been cooperating in different areas since 2017. For example, the two players have been involved in the joint industry workshop ‘Fit4E-Mobility’, in the installation of a web guiding system in the PEM electromobility laboratory ‘eLab’ at RWTH Aachen University and in a consortium project with BMW on the topic of “Industrialisation of fuel cells”. Since 2022, PEM and BST have also been cooperating with the ‘Fraunhofer Research Centre for Battery Cell Production FFB’ in Münster and with the German Engineering Federation (VDMA).

rwth-aachen.de (HYNN), rwth-aachen.de (BST)