As gigafactories scale, battery manufacturers face increasing pressure to reduce costs while scrap rates remain stubbornly high.
According to AMETEK Surface Vision’s
Volker Kölmel the problem is rarely a lack of inspection – it’s that defects are found too late.
In battery production,
surface inspection can do more than confirm final quality. Leading manufacturers use it to intervene early, before defects add cost. But the manufacturing process itself makes this challenging. From raw materials through coating and cutting, every stage introduces quality risks.
“Each process step has different challenges, different speeds, and different defect types, and the inspection system has to be adapted to that,” says
Volker Kölmel,
AMETEK Surface Vision’s Global Industry Manager for Plastics, Nonwovens, and Paper.
With over 30 years’ experience in surface inspection across roll-to-roll industries, Volker works with manufacturers to identify where inspection delivers the greatest impact.
Common mistakes
One of the most frequent problems
Volker sees is manufacturers treating inspection as a fixed solution, rather than as part of the process itself. As he puts it,
“Everything starts with the material and the process itself. The inspection system has to be designed around that, not the other way around.” This turns
inspection into a tool for controlling variation, not just documenting defects.
Optical configuration plays a decisive role here. The way a system uses lighting, camera geometry, and image capture determines whether defects stand out clearly or fade into the background.
Switching to video also helps teams learn from production while it’s running, rather than relying only on individual defect snapshots. As
Volker explains,
“With streaming video, you can re-run recorded material with different settings, train the system, and optimize the process without waiting for the next production run.”
A further benefit of streaming video is long-time archiving. Even during the application phase of an inspection system, you have the full, high-resolution footage available right from the beginning for review at any time by the production team.
How to reduce costs at scale
Timing matters just as much as detection capability.
“When you find defects early in the process, you reduce costs later down the line.” Volker says.
“But when the defect goes into the stack, it becomes much more expensive to reject the product later in the process.”
That sharp increase in cost explains why
early inspection plays such a critical role in reducing scrap at gigafactory level.
Fig. Production process for lithium-ion battery cells. Illustration of the main manufacturing stages from input materials to final output, with average value-added share per process step.
This only becomes more important as production scales. As
Volker says,
“Defect traceability is becoming a must in the battery world." By linking inspection data across process steps, manufacturers gain clearer insight into root causes and can act faster to protect yield.
For more on why early detection is key to controlling scrap and cost at scale:
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Download the whitepaper on 'Why Gigafactories Can’t Afford to Ignore Quality Assurance'.
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Or click here to watch our recent webinar