When you think about designing a battery pack for electric vehicles you think at cell, module, BMS and pack level. However, you need to also rapidly think in terms of: electrical, thermal, mechanical, control and safety. Looking at the problem from different angles will help to ensure you don’t miss a critical element.
A good place to start is with the Battery Basics as this talks you through the chemistry, single cell and up to multiple cells in series and parallel. Batterydesign.net is one place to learn about Electric Vehicle Batteries or designing a Battery Pack. Designed by battery engineers for battery engineers.
As a battery pack designer it is important to understand the cell in detail so that you can interface with it optimally. It is interesting to look at the Function of the Cell Can or Enclosure and to think about the relationship between the Mechanical, Electrical and Thermal design.
Modeling software helps battery designers focus on important criteria for their market and use accelerated, virtual experimentation that makes the process much more cost and time-effective.
That’s where battery materials modeling comes into play to help battery designers explore new materials and optimize performance by co-designing the structure and chemistry of new batteries, ultimately shortening development time and cost.
The battery systems in automotive applications have to be highly reliable, as a fault in batteries with several kWh energy content is potentially a risk for human beings. Therefore, a single cell fault must not lead to a failure of the whole battery and due to this an outage of the propulsion power.