Abstract

As industries demand battery systems of increasing power density, Engineers and Designers are required to push the envelope of deliverable power at extreme operating temperatures within ever-shrinking package sizes. These requirements pose a multitude of challenges to be mitigated by the design team – fewer options by which to transfer heat into the ambient, less massive electronics seeing fast temperature rises during transient operation, and reliance on materials and methods of heat transport which may be novel to the organization. In the early stages of a product’s development, the Analyst is posed with the challenge of providing useful and accurate insights despite the lack of data for these new materials and methods. 

This presentation focuses on the methods employed to generate a coupled thermal-electric simulation of a battery system in Abaqus utilizing meagerly available data. With some ingenuity from the Analyst and application of the fundamentals in thermodynamics and heat transfer, we can construct a model layering sources of relative certainty to guide early design choices – changes reducing heat generation and increasing transport rates amongst critical components, cells, and electronics – and to identify key areas to instrument during test for validation of the model.

Slide deck

Presenter

Martin Bridge, Engineering Analyst, Navitas Systems