E-BEAMING - Electron BEAM weldIng for Next Generation e-motors

Electron beams will weld copper hairpin windings inside electric motors, replacing the manual soldering that currently limits production speed and quality. The problem is straightforward: electric vehicle motors rely on stators packed with copper wires shaped like hairpins. Joining these wires reliably at scale is a bottleneck. Current methods are slow, prone to defects, and difficult to inspect without cutting the part open. The E-BEAMING consortium—Ford, Cambridge Vacuum Engineering, and Warwick Manufacturing Group—aims to prove that electron beam welding can do the job faster and more consistently, while extending the welder’s lifespan with longer-lasting lanthanum hexaboride cathodes and adding real-time X-ray quality checks. If the project succeeds, the immediate impact is on manufacturing floors: faster, more reliable stator production with fewer scrapped parts. That could lower the cost of electric motors and, by extension, electric vehicles. Less directly, it strengthens the UK supply chain for a component—the stator—that quietly determines motor efficiency, range, and reliability. This is applied engineering, not fundamental science. There is no new physics here, only a systematic push to make an existing industrial process viable for mass production.