Design and Simulation of Battery Enclosure for an Electric Vehicle Application

Making a sturdy battery box or enclosure is one of the many challenging issues that the expansion of electrification entails. Many characteristics of an effective battery housing contribute to the safety of passengers and shield the battery from the harsh environment created by vibrations and shocks due to varying road profiles in the vehicle. This results in stress and deformations of different degrees. There is a need to understand and develop a correlation between structural performance and lightweight design of battery enclosure as this can increase the range of the drive and the life cycle of a battery pack.

This paper investigates the following points:

1. I)
   A conceptualized CAD model of battery enclosure is developed to understand the design parameters such as utilization of different material for strength and structural changes for performance against vibration and strength.
2. II)
   Further, the study would be followed with a series of Finite Element Analyses (FEAs) on simplified models for different load cases, modal analysis, and random excitations of acceleration. The responses of the numerical experiments are the stiffness and natural frequency, evaluated together with the mass of the system.
3. III)
   Finally, Design gauge optimization for the battery enclosure is explored through thickness analysis, showing improvement in the static and dynamic characteristics.

The introduction of numerical procedure and design optimization process is shown to be beneficial to reduce the number of physical tests and product development cost and cycle.