Xnovo Technology has deployed its AI-powered 3D computed tomography (3D-CT) inspection system at the BMW Group's Cell Manufacturing Competence Centre (CMCC) in Parsdorf, Germany, the Copenhagen-based company said September 15. The system automates quality assurance of battery cells directly on the production floor, pairing deep learning-based anomaly detection with high-throughput cluster computing.
3D-CT has served as a standard method for non-destructive inspection for years, giving engineers a look inside a part's internal structure without cutting it open. But lab scans that take hours don't translate to a 24/7 production line, where scans need to finish in seconds. Compressing scan time introduces more noise, more CT artifacts, and lower contrast, conditions that break conventional inspection workflows. That gap between lab-grade CT and production-line CT is what Xnovo says its system closes.
The deployed pipeline runs automated image pre-processing first, including beam-hardening correction, volume alignment, and battery component segmentation. It then applies Xnovo's proprietary deep learning-based anomaly detection, generates reports automatically, and feeds results into factory data systems over OPC UA and Q-DAS interfaces. Operators see production quality in real time, and Xnovo says the distributed architecture scales with production throughput. Getting CT to run reliably at cycle-time speed, rather than as an offline lab sample check, is the harder engineering problem for battery manufacturers than the scanning itself, and it is the piece most inspection vendors have not solved yet.
Xnovo built the system in close coordination with BMW's engineering teams and integrated BMW's own analysis methods into the inspection pipeline, aligning it with the automaker's existing quality standards and workflows. Dr. Christian Holzner, Managing Director at Xnovo Technology, said the project shows "automated, AI-powered 3D-CT inspection is no longer a laboratory concept, but a production reality." Dr. Stefan Kerscher, Head of Battery Cell Technology Development at the BMW Group, called the result a new "benchmark for battery inspection software."
The technology was presented in a joint talk by Dr.-Ing. Simon Schmid of the BMW Group CMCC and Dr. Sven Gondrom-Linke, Senior Product Manager at Xnovo Technology, at the European Conference on Non-Destructive Testing (ECNDT 2026) in Verona, Italy.
