Laser cutting of graphite anodes for automotive lithium-ion secondary batteries: investigations in the edge geometry and heat affected zone

To serve the high need of lithium-ion secondary batteries of the automobile industry in the next ten years it is necessary to establish highly reliable, fast and non abrasive machining processes. In previous works [1] it was shown that high cutting speeds with several meters per second are achievable. For this, mainly high power single mode fibre lasers with up to several kilo watts were used. Since lithium-ion batteries are very fragile electro chemical systems, the cutting speed is not the only thing important. To guarantee a high cycling stability and a long calendrical life time the edge quality and the heat affected zone (HAZ) are equally important. Therefore, this paper tries to establish an analytical model for the geometry of the cutting edge based on the ablation thresholds of the different materials. It also deals with the composition of the HAZ in dependence of the pulse length, generated by laser remote cutting with pulsed fibre laser. The characterisation of the HAZ was done by optical microscopy, SEM, EDX and Raman microscopy.