Welding for alternative energy solutions in the aerospace sector

TWI has looked at different welding approaches to address a variety of needs in fabrication for alternative energy sources. This presentation will give an overview of the latest developments in this area. The joining technologies include laser welding, friction welding, electron beam welding, and ultrasonic wedge bonding, among other.

Some developments have targeted the needs in electric vehicle fabrication, such as light-weighting and high productivity. The advances and knowledge acquired in the automotive sector and cross-sectorial technology transfer across other industries such as aerospace will be presented. The benefits fund when using these technologies are: increased welding speed, highly repeatable process, low cost, ability to join dissimilar materials.

One of the projects that TWI has been working on is part of the Innovate UK funded project PlasMan2 in which TWI has collaborated with other partners. This work delivered a high productivity method for manufacturing battery packs for electric vehicles. Initial trials have shown that EB welding bus bars-to-battery cells can increase the throughput of a welding machine by 20 times. Increasing the welding throughput will inevitably reduce the cost of the battery pack production. This would lead to reduced battery packs and greater adoption of EV’s away from conventional technology, as a result improving the impact on the CO2 emissions.