Competitive engineering of battery packs for vehicle applications requires a careful alignment of function against vehicle manufacturer requirements. Traditional battery engineering practices focus on flow down of requirements from the top-level system requirements through to low-level components, meeting or exceeding each requirement at every level. This process can easily produce an over-engineered, cost-uncompetitive product.
By integrating the key limiting factors of battery performance, we can directly compare battery capability to requirements. Here, we consider a power-oriented microhybrid battery system using coupled thermal and electrochemical modeling. We demonstrate that using dynamic resistance acquired from drive cycle characteristics can reduce the total size of the pack compared to typical static, fixed-duration resistance values. Next, we demonstrate that using real-world environmental characteristics, driving patterns, and transient thermal analysis results in significant reduction in battery requirements and size compared to steady-state, worst-case requirements analysis.