Civan Lasers, Fraunhofer ILT, and Smart Move to develop faster bipolar welding feed rate for EV fuel cells

Dynamic beam lasers may provide the automotive industry with a technological solution for economically mass-producing clean-energy engines through increased feed rate for bipolar welding, according to recent findings taking place at the Eureka Project in the Fraunhofer Labs in Aachen, Germany.

As the automotive industry shifts to e-mobility, manufacturers are also shifting from combustion engines to fuel cell engines. The challenge to produce these fuel cells efficiently lies in welding the bipolar plates—thin plates of just hundreds of microns. Each cell contains 300 to 400 of these plates with a weld seam of 3 to 6 m. While there are many efforts to increase the welding speed to keep up with the demand, increasing the feed rate to more than 0.5 m/sec. results in welding defects, leading to faulty parts and a backlog of materials.

The three companies driving the Eureka Project—Civan Lasers in Israel and Germany-based Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT and Smart Move—aim to solve this problem by implementing Civan Lasers’ dynamic beam laser technology, which can wobble the beam in microhertz frequencies, creating a faster, more accurate weld of the bipolar plates.

“We look to reach a breakthrough in this project by using advanced sensors and complex beam shapes in high frequencies that were not available in the past,” said Dr. Alexander Olowinsky, researcher from Fraunhofer ILT.