Abstract

The swelling of pouch cells caused by lithium intercalation during life-time cycling will lead to degradation of capacity (SOH) loss and varied expansion of the cells. This will result in specific swelling force imposed on module for structural safety risk as well as cell performance concern with the external pressure constraints interacted from the module. The challenge for the design group is to locate a practical and optimal range that balances the energy efficiency, cell performance and strength of the module at concept design stage and during fast iterations of design changes. Swelling Modeling Automation Package is a fast end-to-end workflow, half-automated process templates to speed up the creation, debugging and updating of CAE models to better assist fast design iterations using ESI Virtual-Process as an open and integrated environment that enable efficient product engineering and analysis cross domains. The process is developed to include automated steps of part assemble, material and joint assignment, boundary condition and varied swelling load conditions for Finite Element (FE) modeling of EOL battery swelling stage in module. Additional output definition is developed in the process script for standardized output report and for complete output datasheet for model and design evaluation. Extreme time-efficiency can be achieved through the consistency and further improvement of current CAE processes with reduced order of modeling. This CAE workflow of automation package based on Single Core Model of VPS Solver for Swelling Analysis of Battery. A hypothetic global baseline FE model has been delicately developed for analyzing battery module expansion deformation and corresponding swelling force of pouch battery module at EOL using VPS metric file input. This modeling method has been verified with internal test data and can reach the accuracy of engineering satisfaction. Further reduction of model numerical size and improvement on computational efficiency can also be benificial and be incorporated directly into the current automated work-flow to save time. In general, the process is currently one of the industry-leading tool as one example to streamline the CAD to CAE result with modularized package design for battery pack.