Industrialize the industry
With around 6,200 employees, Bosch in Bamberg is one of the largest production sites in the Bosch Group. Decades of manufacturing expertise is gathered here. The successful development of the Hybrion PEM electrolysis stacks required a powerful implementation of concepts in industrial products and systems. Carina Heinlein is one of those people driving this innovative technology forward. As leader of the assembly team, Carina loves the challenge of constantly finding new solutions, new ways to optimize and explore the technology’s unrevealed potential.
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From one new solution to the next…
Carina's simultaneous engineering team brings together design, engineering, manufacturing and technical service experts from various Bosch locations. Together with shopfloor supervisor Christian Beier, she is in charge of the first sample build-ups, an important step of the electrolysis industrialization project. Starting in 2022 with a handful of people, the team around Carina and Christian can already look back on a number of successes today.
One example is an in-house developed stack tensioning tool, which is essential for stack production as it enables to clamp stacks with several hundred of tons almost homogeneously within minutes. The space requirement and lead time for a comparable press would have been much higher. A remarkable example of the innovative efforts within Carina's team over the past two years is the improvement of the pressure distribution measurement of stacks.
Exclusively designed sensors show the force distribution within sample stacks throughout the process chain. The results achieve process optimization and ensure incremental product improvement.
These solutions are the result of an exceptional team performance. Carina emphasizes: „We have great people, who are willing to work really hard for this technology to evolve“.
…to todays’ success
Today, the Hybrion PEM electrolysis stack consists of several dozen cells. At Bosch Bamberg, stacks are produced based on customer orders. The demand will multiply in the next years. Therefore, it is important to develop production processes and facilities that meet the changing needs. With the Hybrion stack, Bosch Bamberg industrializes another hydrogen product. This is an important step in the plant's transformation.
Simultaneous engineering
It is not common for process-optimized production to be running during the development phase, but this approach has helped to tremendously reduce time-to-market. Simultaneous engineering parallelizes processes that used to run one after another. As a result, lifecycles are shorter and products mature faster. For the electrolysis stack project the parallelization meant: The Bamberg team is in constant exchange with the pre-development team at our Tilburg site and with the product construction engineers at our site in Linz. The findings from Bamberg’s manufacturing team were then fed back to product design. “Sometimes there are findings that change the product considerably,” says Christian Hymon, plant project leader of the Electrolysis team. And so the iterative process continues.
Stack industrialization. Made in Bamberg. The early days.
In the beginning, there were no machines or production facilities for the Hybrion PEM electrolysis stack. „We had to start from scratch with the entire production environment like a real startup“, Benjamin Huebner, Senior Manager Manufacturing Engineering, explains. This meant finding rededicated space in the factory, taking into consideration walls, floor, climate, machine design and special machine construction. Not an easy job, but the Bamberg team achieved the impossible and not only created the required environment, but also managed to build a first prototype within 10 weeks.
Fast forward: Outlook 2050
Previously the focus was on developing something that was not there before, in 2050 the estimated focus will be to optimize production, processes and the product maturing through new product generations. By 2050, the industry will likely be faced with topics like changes in materials, new quality standards, recycling options and more. Many challenges still lie ahead. But 2050 holds even more opportunities for a future with green technology – and the Hybrion PEM electrolysis stack by Bosch.
