The demand for electric vehicles (EVs) has put automakers in a race to reach new levels of manufacturing precision. Of course, the trend towards higher precision manufacturing has been in place for several decades as cars have become increasingly complex and sophisticated. Lasers have played a key role in this transformation all along.

Today lasers are routinely used for demanding processes like drilling small, precisely shaped holes for fuel injector nozzles, welding advanced steel alloys, and automatic transmission gear welding. Often, new methods were required to perform these processes. But in some cases, none of the existing laser-based systems could meet the requirements, and entirely new technology was needed.

This is exactly the case for some of the most demanding EV manufacturing tasks now coming on-line – especially those involved in making the batteries themselves. This is because several of these steps require processing very thin and heat-sensitive materials. And these processes must be performed fast enough, and with sufficiently high yield, to be economically feasible. No laser-based tools could meet all these needs before now.

Coherent has developed a new generation of products specifically designed to satisfy the requirements of the most challenging EV battery assembly operations, surpassing traditional remote welding systems. Specifically, its ARM fiber laser in combination with the SmartWeld+ processing head is now able to offer a new laser weld process and deliver better results in one of the most critical tasks involved when assembling pouch and prismatic battery cells. This is supplemented by real-time in-process monitoring of the Coherent SmartSense+ system to detect defects and issues.

Read the interactive issue in the Adobe Cloud, or download the single-article PDF – Thomas Hofmeister & Majid Abbasi (Coherent): Reinventing laser processing for EVs, PhotonicsViews 22 (D1), April 2025, pp. 8–11