Welding Aluminium Busbars on Prismatic Cells

ALUMINIUM being a highly conductive metal finds wide usage in EV Lithium-ion Battery manufacturing. From our recent experiences that we have had with most of our customers, we noticed something in common!

We could realize that many of the people in the industry lack appropriate info on the weldability of different grades of Aluminium busbars that they plan to use for their Prismatic Battery Packs.

Welding Aluminium requires precise heat input on desired area with proper weld penetration between the busbar and the terminal to achieve an aesthetic and strong weld quality. Due to inappropriate laser parameters and wrong selection of metal grades, the problems of porosity and thermal cracks tends to appear on the weld area leading to low tensile strength.

Different Aluminium grades have different welding properties.

For example: 1000, 3000 and 5000 series have good weldability.

The 2000, 6000, and 7000 series Aluminium have tendency of cracks and poor seam formation.

As the magnesium content increases, the welding performance increases but the ductility and corrosion resistance become worse.

Mostly all our Prismatic cell customers who come to us have plans of laser welding Aluminium Busbar (1060 series) to the Prismatic Aluminium Terminal of 1060 series. Since 1000 series is considered to be an industrially purest form of Aluminium, we recommend it to be used as busbars as they are more conductive as well as easy to laser weld with the capability to achieve good pullout strength.

We have successfully welded Aluminium Busbars (2mm 1060 series) laser welded on Prismatic Battery Packs with Aluminium Terminal (3mm 1060 series) at our facility Light Mechanics Ltd.