Full Electric Vehicle Crash Simulation Using Coupled Thermal-Electrical-Mechanical Analysis

The safety of electric vehicles (EVs) has become increasingly important as the number of EVs has grown rapidly in recent years. This work presents a system solution to model the full EV structural crash analysis together with its active battery cells using a thermal-mechanical-electrical coupled analysis. This multi-physics analysis predicts the sequence of events that could lead to thermal runaway and battery fire. In previous work, a representative battery cell model was first developed based on matching the cell dimensions and the total amount of material in a realistic cell. Each battery component was modeled separately with realistic mechanical, electrical, and thermal material models.