Designing Safe Battery Modules : An Interdisciplinary Approach

With active interactions among forty or more suppliers, battery design is becoming increasingly an inter-disciplinary science. Uniformity in properties with feature sizes as small as a few hundred nanometers across millions of units produced every month only heightens the need to coordinate design aspects across length and timescales. Thin safety margins (literally sub-microns) driven by the need to maximize energy stored per unit volume demand quantifying effects of design changes on the battery’s response under different abuse scenario. Experimental studies on batteries do not always provide comprehensive quantitative insights into the interactions across different physical phenomena. Most computational studies are limited to single cells or specific failure modes. We explore some practical aspects of addressing safety concerns over lithium-ion batteries using a specific example of an automotive battery module subject to a crash event. We superpose potential field and heat flux across different components onto the module being deformed to study the interplay of different failure modes. This approach has implications for use of upcoming tools like augmented reality for battery pack design