A rubber sealing for a water-cooled battery pack plays a significant role to prevent water immersion into the inside of the pack. The appropriate design including the adjacent parts achieves a weight reduction of the battery pack by reducing the battery tray thickness and the quantity of bolts used in the whole battery pack.
Generally, finite element analysis (FEA) is effective for the design optimization before proto-typing. However, the application to the sealing for a battery pack requires a large scale analysis, including the complicated contacts and large deformation of the rubber sealing, and results in unpractically long computation time and frequent computation errors due to the finite element distortion.
A multi-scale structural analysis and the process on the rubber sealing for the battery pack has been developed to solve the above issues. This approach consists of 3 steps, which are single-unit, entire-scale and detailed structural analysis.
The cross-section of rubber sealing was simplified as rectangular shape by modifying the mechanical property of the sealing to meet the reaction force characteristic with the original one through the Step 1. Using this simplified model, the entire-scale analysis including the whole battery pack was carried out to extract the area from the entire seal line at which the seal pressure decreases to less than the requirement or high stress of the battery tray and the cover occurs. Then, the detailed structural analysis at the extracted area was carried out for quantitative evaluation.
The developed structural analysis and its work flow can contribute to rubber sealing design optimization by shortening the computation time and reducing the computation errors. In this paper, the developed simulation methodology including the analysis flow are specifically presented. The simulation conditions and results for a battery pack of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) are shown as the case study.
