Hey boys and girls, Cory and I are in Fremont, California. And we all know what that means, right? We're gonna go and visit a battery plant. Oh, wait a minute, not that one. This one. Stay tuned.
So we're gonna start by doing anode fabrication. We're gonna do this more or less in the order of the manufacturing process. Okay, great. We're a small operation. Actually, we're doubling our footprint as we speak. And we're occupying or soon will be the adjacent facility. Very good.
So this is our anode fabrication area. And directly ahead with the name. Oh, okay. Is this on? Yeah, okay. Directly ahead with the name Smith. This is the second of two roll to roll systems. When we first ventured into production, we went forward with a roll to roll solution. And we're producing anode as we speak from these systems. And this is what we're shipping products to our customers with. Okay.
这是我们的阳极制造区,直接前面就是以 Smith 命名的第二个滚筒制造系统。当我们开始生产时,我们采用了滚筒制造解决方案,我们正在使用这些系统制造阳极。这就是我们向客户出货的产品。
So what you're looking at is essentially a set of chambers where we're growing the nanowire, nanowire, one nanor 2, that's two step process. And then it goes into the PECVD, which is when we do the amorphous silicon deposition. And then finally, the second CVD, which is that very thin, conformal surface area reduction step. So barefoil in, finished anode out. And then it's coiled at the end. Correct. And then from there, you take it to the assembly area. To the assembly area. Cool.
So we have two of these. They're running 24-7. And this is what we're using to enable our current customer. So this is yours. This is yours. This is one of a kind. And there are two of them. Actually there's another one over there and this is the second iteration of that.
Well, again, I've seen lots of things. I never saw anything like this. So this is an example, as you said, of making your own equipment. Yeah. And what we learned from this is that that's fighting a war on a separate front. And what we decided was let's take somebody else's solution. That is that's already proven in manufacturing and doing adaptation on it. And that's a clever way of making it happen.
I've never heard of Smith or SM, who are a Dutch company? They're based in the Netherlands. And they've got a long history in making various furnaces and plasma systems. And this is the central thermosystem that you saw in the slide deck. Let me just come around this side for a better view. Yeah. This is Dr. Brian Beatty. Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I'm the manager of a process development. And he's going to walk it through what this does, how it does it, and give you some sort of demonstration of it. Oh, great. Because we're going to be sharing a microphone. That's fantastic.
Well, thank you very much, Sandy. We appreciate you guys taking the time to come visit us today. So again, this is the test sample for our mass production pilot line. So here in Fremont, we're actively developing our products. We're trying to scale up our manufacturing. And this system is a big part of what's going to enable that. We're moving to this furnace-based batch process. And a big part of why we chose to do that enables huge throughput, scalability, and a lot of other work that lets us really work faster, more effectively, more productively.
I think so. Sensor-therm has been developing materials for the solar industry for decades now. And this is the latest off their production line. And a big part of why we chose to go with them is they are designing for manufacturability of commodity products. Their products have to be uniform, they have to be high-deficition rate, they have to be huge throughput. Same needs as us.
Let's us not have to reinvent the wheel and leverage the learnings of an industry that has already gone through the scaling and the difficulties of that transition to mass production. So as we can see, we have a bunch of material. The tool kind of handles itself. It's wonderful because we can make sure that engineers and our technicians can load and operate and the system can manually or automatically process the system completely on its own. And so material is loaded into the tubes and is processed. We get this huge deposition rate which is a big part of how our anode really functions. We need to get a lot of our pure silicon onto our structures.
So as we can see, a boat full of wafers or a boat full of coils, as you can see in the loading chamber here gets loaded into the tube automatically by the processing system. It will go in there and it will process for a certain amount of time in order to deposit whatever processing steps is really required here. So we run everything from barefoil all the way through to finish anode and be done in one of these five chambers here on this one processing one. Anyway, I'm looking at two different colors here as well. You can see the light gray for the ones that haven't been touched yet. I'm assuming and then the dark when they come out of the out of the chambers.
So it's kind of like a visual that some of our viewers would like to see. Absolutely. Well, this is very good. Thanks so much. Very excited. We're happy to have you. It's been a very absolute pleasure. Well, I'm pretty excited myself. So let's see what's next.
Okay, so we get coupons from the role that you just saw from the ANO team. So basically sampling them. You can see here I have a start and an end coupon that's available. So I get sections and we take a top down view and a cross section view to see how it looks under the microscope. So that gives us a good idea of how the process has turned out. So you're looking at density. I'm assuming.
Yes. And also the nanoware diadiameters. So you can see this is like a 100x view. Yeah. I'm going to go. This is 250x. You can get a good idea of how dense the nanoware is grown into and the uniformity and the uniformity. And the uniformity. Yeah. So that's what we get from a top down view and then from a cross section you can get the nanoware height and a good sense of how spaced out they are.
So what would determine is is all visual or is there some other metric that you use to determine whether or not these samples are in spec? In spec. In this quality check it's mostly visual. So I have like a current sample right there. That's a five sample. So that is encircled inside. So if I turn that on you're getting like only a visual but a microscopic feedback of how it looks in this case.
I see. And that's what's appearing here now. That's definitely a lot higher than 100x. So that's close to five dozen x. I'm just zooming in on just one nanoware from a top down view. So you can see that it is relatively rough which is an indication of the fact that it's porous. Yeah. Yeah. I see the symmetrical rings. It actually looks like a cross section of a tree trunk or something. So that's a good indication as grown as opposed to what we normally see which doesn't look like that ever. So this is a very, to me this is hugely interesting. I'm really impressed. Really impressed.
This is an automatic formation chamber. So the cells that we're making are loaded between this contact plate and then they are automatically pressed. It's controlling environment here. So we're doing about 128 cells at a time and that's on one machine. So most of the stations are individual machines. So this is a production system albeit a small version of it that's used in every battery manufacturer making power cells in the world today. Expanded facility will have many of these and of course in mass production they'll be bigger but essentially it's the same function where you load the cell into these pockets and into these slots. Compression is applied and they're connected electrically and there's temperature applied and this is called formation.
So the first cycle of the cell is the formation and it's very important for the properties of the cell. So what is the yield grade on this at this point? Like how many?
细胞的第一个生命周期是形成,它对细胞的属性非常重要。那么此时的产量是什么等级?有多少呢?
In cell assemblies relatively high over 90, 95 percent. In that range 90, 95 percent cell assembly. The fallout here is mostly it doesn't seal well or perfectly or there's a defect in one of the steps. So then you have to eliminate it. Also at the end we do quality control for every cell we actually do a full cycle capacity check. So every cell is checked by capacity, by internal resistance and then we have also a waiting period measuring the self discharge rate. So that's also within certain limits of acceptable range.
So this one started also from zero. You can see the first 30 minutes at 20, about 20. The temperature you can see is really going up there. Yeah, temperature is going up. So it's conditioning itself basically it's getting into the higher temperature which allows it to even faster charge. So now it jumped to 10C current, about 35 amp ampere. 10 percent in under one minute. Yeah, it's actually close to 15 percent in a minute. Yeah, this is really quite interesting for me because these are not the kind of numbers I would normally expect to see in this amount of time.
Like we're looking at about one minute and we got almost 18 percent charge. That's hauling right along. It's moved up to about double what you'd find in a room temperature. But that's nothing extraordinary. Or as I'm concerned this is kind of like I say this is about as revolutionary as I've seen. Yeah, taking 27 ampere which is about 100 watts at this charging power. So now it's charging at maximum rate. 10C continuous, constant current.
Yeah, so it's pretty warm now. Yeah, it's getting 50 degrees. But this is pretty normal. It's not the high temperature. It's not extraordinary. It's not extraordinary high. It's pretty normal temperature and it can be controlled in a car. It's a normal temperature during charging. Yeah.
Yeah, again to put things into perspective, it started out at 21 which is about 70 degrees and boiling point for water was 100 degrees. So you can see that you're basically in between as it were boiling and room temperature. It's actually starting to drop. It should go down a stone now. So we haven't exceeded 55 degrees actually. But it's still amazingly fast as far as charges concerned. But we're going to watch to 80. 80 percent. Yes, take it to 90. We can wait to 90. It's going to be slower and slower. Yeah.
Yeah, 90 should be about seven minutes, eight, seven, eight minutes. And then it starts to really slow down. Really slow down. Yes. I think the last 10% takes almost as much time as you can of the other 80 or so. But overall it's still very fast. Yeah, 50 to 100 percent. At the end of the day, I'm not much of a fan of going to 100 percent ever. So biggest to 90 and would you say eight minutes or something like that? I would suggest that that would work for me. We might beat six minutes here. Yeah. You're being. Yeah, we will. 18, 5 minutes. Right. Did you plan this? We've done a few of these. So it's fairly predictable. Yeah, I mean, seconds plus minus it's hard to control. But our own six minutes is what we say. Yeah, certainly hit the target. I'm pretty impressed. We've watched lots of different tests and whatnot. I haven't seen anything like this. Any of this is kind of representative of a complete pack. This basically nobody's got anything like this. We should stop it. Thank you. Cool. Wow. I think that's the tour. That's the grand finale. Wow, that's the grand finale. Stopped it at the right time. Definitely. I'm.
So we should say that that cell is about 370 watt per kilogram. It's 371 hours per kilogram. It's a power cell. It's a power cell. Yeah, it's about, yeah. That's what it says. It's 75 or 78 something like that. I can't remember. Wow, amazing.
That's really cool. That's really, really impressive. The 400 will charge about 80% in 15 minutes. So they don't have as much power capability, but still charge remarkably fast compared to the graphite pack. And the conference room.
So anyways, gentlemen, I would really like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for an absolutely wonderful morning. This to me was as eye-opening as it gets. I see a future for the for the VTOL or actually electrified flight industry. I can't begin to tell you how excited I am about your future. This is, you guys have something that nobody else has. You've got something that basically gives me twice as much power as what anybody else can. As far as grab a metric and volume metric standpoint, I'm totally blown away. I got a chance to watch the whole process. It looks like you've got it all locked in. I like to say a lot of times I figure I wasted my time on some of these trips. But this definitely was an eye-opening experience. I can't thank you enough.
And Dr. Sung, do you have anything you'd like to close off with?
“Sung博士,你有什么要结束语吗?”-意思是询问Sung博士是否有任何最后发言的内容。
Sandy, on behalf of our team here, I really thank you and the Corey taking time to visit us. I hope you leave here with the impression. First, I'm here has unmatched Bethweigh performance in the Tio Mall and the better industry. Secondly, we are ready to scale up. We have been delivering solid commercial products since the 2018. We certainly keep your update. We'll come back again. Yes.
Well, actually, I'm hoping I will come back again. And like I said, I'd like to bring some of your stuff. We have a booth at the World Congress for the SAE. And I think it'd be a good idea if I let other people know because I never heard of you before. You guys have done a very good job of keeping under the radar as far as I was concerned. So I'm very impressed and I think the rest of the world should know about it about you as well. And so anyway, with that, let me close it out. Thank you very much for watching and I'm in real life. I'm going to thank you all the people here at Ampress for giving us a marvelous tour. It was well worth the flight out here to California. Thanks for watching and we'll see you. Bye.