Abstract: With the increased focus on the development of Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) by the automotive OEMs, it is the need of the hour to reduce the BEV development cycle time. It is required to design the battery for various operating conditions, manufacturing loading conditions, in-plant, and service loads during the development cycle. At present, Linear Hexahedral elements are used in detailed battery modeling to balance the cross-functional needs from durability load cases, crash load cases, computational time, model size, and limitations from commercial software current rent approach has hugely limited the virtual development cycle as modeling with Linear Hexahedral elements becomes the bottleneck. It demands more than 60% of development cycle time. This paper will explore the feasibility of using the Quadratic Tetrahedral elements for battery finite element modeling and its impact on the overall cycle time to accelerate the virtual development cycle. This is done by comparing the performance of Linear Hexahedral and Quadratic Tetrahedral elements concerning various parameters such as Modal Frequency, Mode shape, Displacement, Stress, and Fatigue life.
A detailed study of comparison between Linear Hexahedral and Quadratic Tetrahedral elements is performed starting with a theoretical problem and analyzed complex battery modules under various loading conditions using SIMULIA Abaqus. It is observed that the Quadratic Tetrahedral with improved surface visualization C3D10I had performed better than the Linear Hexahedral elements in all aspects. Quadratic Tetrahedral elements for battery cast or mold components saved around 70% of modeling time. On the downside, Quadratic Tetrahedral elements increase the output file size, which can be handled with selective output requests.
Biography: Gopika Hariharan, a Mechanical Engineering graduate, works as a CAE Engineer in Tata Consultancy Services. She has around three years of experience. She has been part of the Automotive OEM project and has supported various Battery Structural Simulations. She had also been part of capability projects where the problem statements were addressed and had been able to provide solutions that reduced human efforts and brought cost savings.
Co-author: Sridhar MEKA, Jagadeesh BABU, Ravitej KOMMANA, Edwin MATHEW, Vinod REDDY Tata Consultancy Services, India & Faisal SAYEED, Thomas WANG, Harikrishna KETHA, Virendra DEWANGAN, General Motors, North America
