Deyu

Shenzhen Deyu Intelligent Equipment Co., Ltd. manufactures lithium battery winding machines for cylindrical and prismatic cells — a segment where precision directly determines battery reliability and energy density. As demand for higher-throughput production grew, Deyu needed to enhance equipment productivity and plant-wide efficiency without sacrificing the tight tension control that defines winding quality. Imprecise tension management in winding machines leads to defective cells, increased scrap rates, and downstream reliability failures — costs that compound quickly at production scale. The challenge was to modernize machine control in a way that enabled full-servo automation while meeting the accuracy requirements of next-generation battery manufacturing.

Deyu integrated Allen-Bradley CompactLogix control systems and Kinetix servo drives from Rockwell Automation into their new-generation all-in-one winding machine for cylindrical lithium batteries. The CompactLogix platform handles programmable logic control across the machine's automated sequences, while Kinetix servo drives provide the motion control infrastructure needed for high-precision tension management during winding and unwinding. Together, these components enabled full-servo winding and unwinding — replacing less precise control architectures with coordinated, closed-loop motion across all axes. The system also supports fully automatic cylindrical cell winding and battery tab welding in a single integrated machine, reducing the number of discrete process steps and tightening process consistency across production runs.

With Rockwell Automation's automation and information technology solutions deployed across the winding machine platform, Deyu achieved a measurable step-change in output:

• ~25% increase in equipment productivity following implementation

Beyond the headline figure, the upgrade delivered qualitative improvements central to battery manufacturing: more consistent tension control across winding cycles, reduced operator intervention through fully automatic operation, and tighter integration between winding and tab-welding processes. These gains directly support Deyu's core value proposition to customers — helping battery producers achieve higher throughput and lower per-unit costs while improving the reliability and energy density of finished cells.

• Full-servo motion control is a prerequisite for precision battery winding — closed-loop servo systems eliminate the tension variability that causes cell defects at scale.
• Combining control and motion on a unified platform (CompactLogix + Kinetix) simplifies integration and reduces tuning complexity compared to mixed-vendor architectures.
• Automating secondary operations (tab welding) within the same machine sequence compounds productivity gains beyond what single-process automation achieves.
• Productivity improvements of ~25% are achievable through motion control modernization alone, without requiring a full facility overhaul.
• For OEMs building capital equipment, embedding automation platform choices early in machine design determines how much headroom customers have for future throughput optimization.