Throughout late October and November 2021 STL have been busy exhibiting at a trio of UK exhibitions, encompassing the Battery Tech Expo 2021 at Silverstone, Battery Technology UK at the Ricoh Arena and Advanced Engineering 2021 at the NEC Birmingham.
The common theme linking these UK based exhibitions was visitor interest in electric vehicle/ busbar manufacturing technology.
Busbars are an integral part of EV battery packs, improving the busbar can lead to lighter packs, therefore extending the range of zero emission vehicles and developing the lighter, greener vehicles of the future.
Electrical contact bi-metal materials have long been supplied by STL into the power and fuse market, typically using copper and silver combinations. STL has been working to extend this technology and offer Aluminium to copper bonded strip. This could provide a reliable method of allowing easier joining techniques between dissimilar metals in some typical cell designs.
A collaborative project with TWI Ltd to investigate an innovative Copper to Aluminium bonding technique for use in zero emission vehicle busbars was initiated, funded by Innovate UK, and first off-tool samples are starting to be available for materials characterisation. This will take several months but having been slowed by the pandemic, we are back on track and targeting the Battery Show in Stuttgart in June 2022 as the product release event.
Last year, Redditch based metal contact and precision stamping specialists STL announced a significant contract win to support vehicle electrification, a first for our company. As automotive technology radically changes, so will traditional supply chains.
A combination of metal joining technology and stamping expertise should position STL in the growing electro-mechanical base of new suppliers to the automotive EV marketplace.