Abstract: Rechargeable Energy Storage Systems, the viability of electrically powered propulsion in passenger vehicles, light trucks, and multipurpose vehicles in the automotive industry, have greatly improved safety. The energy storage components in the Electric Vehicle should meet several requirements as per global standards. This mandatory national standard requires that all traction batteries of electric vehicles in the Chinese market pass the immersion test. One of the biggest challenges is to meet the IPX7 ISO 20653 and ISO 6469 with large enclosures. The seal on RESS is an essential component to be selected to avoid short circuits thermal runaway due to water ingress. Different Sealing methods are available for enclosures like Formed in Place Gasket, Silicon Closed Cell Foam, Liquid, and EPDM rubber Sealing. Sealing solutions are a function of several design considerations such as serviceability, assembly, cost, and design stiffness of enclosures.
In the whole working process, contact states of seals are very complicated, and they change over vehicle life. It is essential to accurately find separate positions and contact positions to study the leaking on RESS. Many applications that employ these materials subject them to a sizeable nonlinear strain. Therefore, the simple Hooke’s law is not sufficient to describe their material behavior. This paper presents an approach to obtain material properties of foams under compression loading through experimental tests and using them in finite element modeling.
The foam sealing solution is virtually tested using Abaqus. Its sealing effectiveness is based on foam properties, enclosure stiffness at the sealing area, and design pitch for fasteners on the flange. Information such as deformed configuration and the contact pressure is obtained in the analyses. Results show that silicon closed-cell foam has a good seal performance when proper pitch optimization is done on the enclosure to reduce the number of fasteners concerning the packaging. Simulation results in Abaqus have shown a good correlation with biological validation data.
Biography: Rajkiran Kulkarni, currently working as Manager-Mechanical Design Energy Systems, Mahindra EVTech Centre. He has close to 8 years of experience in automotive industry with a specialization in design. He has been working on HV Battery System in Mahindra EV Tech Centre from past 2.5 years. Prior to Mahindra, he was working with General Motors Technical Centre India for 5 years in the field of Engineering Design. He has BE degree from PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore. His areas of interest- Battery Pack Design and development.
Chockappan NEETHIPATHI is working as a Manager - Product Development for Mahindra Electric, Bangalore. He has close to ten years of experience in the simulation domain in the fields of solid and structural mechanics. He is the gold medalist and holds master’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering from Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University Chennai. In his current role, he involves in Electric Vehicle's product development through virtual simulation. Earlier he worked with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Federal-Mogul Powertrain. His focus areas are Nonlinear FEA, Dynamic analysis and Thermo-mechanical fatigue Analysis.
