Review: Battery Spot Welders, Why You Should Buy A ... - Hackaday

Making battery packs is a common pursuit in our community, involving spot-welding nickel strips to the terminals on individual cells. Many a pack has been made in this way, using reclaimed cells taken from discarded laptops. Commercial battery spot welders do a good job but have a huge inrush current and aren’t cheap, so it’s not uncommon to see improvised solutions such as rewound transformers taken out of microwave ovens. There’s another possibility though, in the form of cheap modules that promise the same results using a battery pack as a power supply.

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With a love of putting the cheaper end of the global electronic marketplace through its paces for the entertainment of Hackaday readers I couldn’t resist, so I parted with £15 (about $20), for a “Mini Spot Welder”, and sat down to wait for the mailman to bring me the usual anonymous grey package.

This Welder Promises much…

What arrived seemed promising, a “Portable Transistor Mini Spot Welder” along with a pair of battery cables and some cables terminated with spot welding electrodes.

The module itself is a sandwich of PCBs on metal standoffs, with a main board holding power electronics and a daughterboard with part-number-sanded microcontroller and small OLED display. There are some control buttons and a power switch on the board along with a socket for a foot pedal, and the main board has screw terminals, a row of hefty MOSFETs, and a large electrolytic capacitor.

Along with the unit was a set of leads, the welding leads being terminated in a set of insulated except for their tip copper probes and the battery leads being unterminated. I fitted a pair of crimp eye connectors to fit my battery terminals. Also in the box was a piece of paper advising on the type of batteries suitable for the task, which boil down to something close to a car battery. I had a suitable sealed lead-acid battery to hand as well as a few dubious cells of the extremely lightweight obvious fake variety, so taking a short piece of nickel strip I set out to weld cell and strip together.

Powering up the device and experimenting with the buttons, it became apparent that there were two modes: an Auto mode that would operate it when it detected something to weld, and a manual mode for operating it via a foot switch. I happen to have a foot switch from another piece of equipment, so opted for that.

Otherwise there’s a power setting calibrated in “E”, with no explanation as to what an “E” is. In fact it’s a measure of energy in terms of the length of the power pulse pulse delivered by the device, and on power-up it’s set to the low end of the range at 5E.

I first tried to hold the two probes in one hand and apply them to strip and cell with the other, but found I lacked the dexterity to pull this off. Reaching for a small bench vice, I was able to position them both such that I could hold cell and strip together against their tips and operate the welder via the foot switch.

… But Delivers Little

Starting at 5E and setting out to find the point at which the device would do a successful spot weld, I increased the power in steps of 5E and tried a weld at each level. The lower levels made the two stick together but only to the point that I could easily pull them apart, so I continued. Sadly I never found the level at which it worked , because at 25E one of those MOSFETs failed to a short circuit with the usual magic smoke smell, and I was unable to continue.

The process of reviewing very cheap electronics of this type is something like playing a one-armed bandit. Sometimes you win the jackpot, but at other times the device turns out to be no diamond in the rough. It’s usual though for it to at least do the job albeit in an entertainingly bad way, so this case of it failing to destruction before I had even managed to get it to perform is particularly disappointing.

Prismatic cell battery production process

prismatic cell battery refers to a battery with an aluminum as the outer shell. It uses a laser sealing process. The fully sealed aluminum shell technology is very mature, and the requirements for material technical indicators (such as gas production and expansion) are not high. It is a very mature form of power battery. Compared with the other two lithium battery forms, cyclinder cell and pouch cell battery, prismatic battery cell have outstanding advantages in market use, mainly including:

① High packaging reliability;

② High system integration efficiency;

③ Relatively light weight and high energy density;

④ Simple structure and convenient capacity expansion, which is the main path choice for single-cell large capacity;

⑤ High single-cell capacity, simple system structure, and convenient battery management.

prismatic cell battery lithium battery production line equipment

prismatic cell lithium battery production line is an important link in the production process of power batteries. It has a significant impact on the performance and service life of the battery. Therefore, the degree of automation and accuracy of operation of the lithium battery production equipment are increasingly attracting market attention.

Xiaowei has a very mature and proven prismatic-cell battery production line that has been recognized in the market. The production line equipment has the following characteristics:

① Strong compatibility, can be customized and compatible with a variety of different series of products according to customer requirements.

② Modular design, short changeover time, fewer parts, and low cost.

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③ High battery production accuracy, visual and mechanical dual positioning methods, improve positioning accuracy.

④ Non-standard customization of fully automatic assembly lines can be achieved according to the battery cells of different process routes of customers.

⑤ Reasonable layout of process equipment, space saving, full automation of the entire line, and very low labor costs.

⑥ High manufacturing quality assurance, real-time detection and monitoring.

⑦ Manufacturing guarantee of battery safety and consistency.

The lithium battery production line is used to realize the automatic assembly of the battery cells after winding/stacking of prismatic aluminum shell lithium-ion power batteries. It is mainly composed of the following parts: hot pressing test machine, pairing machine, ultrasonic welding machine, adapter welding machine, core assembling machine, film coating/hot melting/gluing machine, shell pre-spot welding machine, laser top cover welding machine.

It can realize the functions of battery cell hot pressing, X-ray detection, ear pre-welding pairing, adapter ear welding, back gluing, cover laser welding, gluing, folding ear core assembling, gluing, film coating, shell entry, top cover sealing welding, etc., and realize full automation in the whole process.

The overall layout is reasonable, the equipment is compact, the whole process is automatically monitored and intelligent, each device can realize the traceability function, connect to the MES system, upload data to the system in real time, and the equipment runs stably. In addition, our prismatic battery production line has been put into production in large quantities in the factories of foreign customers, and has been fully verified, and the technology of each equipment is mature.

Customizable lithium-ion prismatic battery production line

For the design of the aluminum shell lithium battery production line, there will be different designs according to the needs of customers. We will consider the following aspects based on the problems encountered in the production process and the corresponding practices:

① Product process: including the size of the battery, the size of the pole ear, the thickness of the welding, etc.

② Factory space size: Reasonably arrange the specific location of the production line equipment, as well as the mechanism to be optimized, etc., and also consider ergonomics, the convenience of manual operation, and the operability of later maintenance.

③ Equipment design: The simpler the structure, the better, so that it is easier to operate.

④ The distribution of beats in the production line: focus on the efficiency of the bottleneck station. If the efficiency is not achieved, consider changing the single station to a double station or even a multi-station. At the same time, high safety performance and product qualification rate are also our key considerations.

⑤ Product positioning method: Different product positioning methods are adopted for different customer needs, such as side positioning, positioning based on both sides, and fixture positioning.

⑥ Dust prevention device: In the cylindrical battery assembly line equipment, basically every device that needs dust removal has corresponding dust removal facilities, such as dust collectors, brushes, etc.

⑧ Quality inspection: CCD inspection, battery thickness inspection, insulation inspection, short circuit inspection, etc. will be designed in the whole set of assembly lines.

⑨ The consistency of the appearance of the production line maintains the beauty of the whole set of equipment.

If you are interested in our prismatic battery production line, please feel free to contact us!

We also provide cylindrical batteries and pouch cell battery production line equipment to meet your different battery production needs.

Are you interested in learning more about Lithium Battery Laser Welding Machine? Contact us today to secure an expert consultation!