Why QuickerSim's Model? Unique Points
Emobility develops rapidly. Car and battery packs manufacturers need to solve all the thermal challenges with thermal conditioning of the batteries. Often, there is little time to work on either simulation models and tools or to develop methodologies for proper and accurate 1-D and 3-D modeling. We bring that know-how with our software and pilot introduction. Especially, we focus that you:
- build the complete simulation model within hours (not weeks of CAD, meshing etc.)
- run the model within minutes
- get the simulation know-how, methodology and validation of our software for your case.
Thermal Challenges! Why to Simulate? Functions
Depending on the type of an electric vehicle and battery technology there arise different thermal challenges in the design of batteries and the cooling systems. Among others, you can use QuickerSim's thermal simulation model of the battery to investigate:
- 3-D temperature field in the battery for any driving cycle (including sports and racing cars)
- 3-D temperature field in the battery for any atmospheric conditions
- temperature of cells and the cooling plate during fast charging
- battery warm-up and preconditioning in winter conditions
- battery cool-down (if you use loss heat from the battery in the HVAC system of the cabin)
- temperature of each single cell at a specified driving profile (bus routes etc.)
- coupling of the battery with the HVAC system.
Source: John P. Rugh et al., Electric Vehicle Battery Thermal Issues and Thermal Management Techniques, NREL
In each case the simulation will allow to confront the temperature levels against such limiting factors as:
- operating temperature range for a battery cell
- electrochemistry
- long-term degradation.
Easy Preprocessing of the Complete Simulation Model
Most of simulation engineer's time is taken for preprocessing of the simulation model. This includes building the CAD geometry of the battery model and meshing. We get rid of it in our software. This tool is tailored to simulation of batteries and battery packs. This is why we provide a powerful configurator of the battery so that you can quickly assemble the whole geometry of the battery from prismatic or cylindrical cells and quickly configure the cooling plate with the cooling channels of almost any geometrical complexity. Since the components are predefined, the meshing is done automatically. Once you know, how your battery looks like, you should need no more than one day of work to build almost any battery in our simulation software.
100x Cut Down in Computation Time
It is not a slogan. We have done a lot of numerical development work to produce a very detailed 3-D accurate thermal simulation model of a battery. Full scale CFD simulations take many CPU hours to converge. And they usually require yet more time to prepare the model (clean CAD geometry and mesh). They need much computing time even for stationary cases.
In the design of battery cooling for EVs you are mostly interested in transient states. This means that with full CFD you would need to go the supercomputer and a week of computations to get time-dependent results for a 5-minutes of the physical driving profile that the designed car or bus must be able to go at any atmospheric conditions.
Hence, QuickerSim developed a simulation model in the space of eigenmodes. It is able to run a transient simulation of the complete battery pack with detailed 3-D temperature distribution in just minutes.
Workflow
- First, define the components that you use in the battery and use our configurator to specify their spatial layout and structure (with almost no limitations in geometrical complexity).
- Define the cooling plate and the cooling channels.
- Define the driving profile and run the simulation.
- See time dependence of temperature at each 3-D location in each cell.
Detailed Reduced 3-D Model
In thermal simulations of the batteries there are two most popular approaches. The first one are 1-D analyses with heat resistances. The second one are 3-D CFD analyses. In many cases 1-D computations are oversimplified. They do not capture any three dimensional effects such as temperature gradients in the cells. In turn, CFD analyses often require supercomputers and days of computations. This is true especially, if we keep in mind that thermal design of battery cooling usually requires full transient analyses at a specified driving profile or atmospheric conditions.
Some reduced simulation models are based on previous simulation or experimental data. The only advantage is that by doing this approximation they work quickly. However, the drawback is that they require data which are not available whatsoever, if we design a new battery pack or a new cooling plate. QuickerSim builds a 3-D reduced model by automatically assembling the finite element mesh for each of the componets. This provides exact physical modeling of each of components. Model reduction is made by a strict mathematical transformation to the eigenvectors space. In that space, almost any temperature field can be represented with very good accuracy by just using a couple of unknowns. This is, why our simulation models are very quick and still give very accurate 3-D results.
For a single cell the thermal eigenmodes whose superposition (linear combination) is later used to represent the 3-D temperature distribution in the battery pack can be visualized as below. In some sense, this order reduction "feels" physics of the phenomenon. The thermal modes will adapt differently, if any nonuniformities are present in the properties of the component.
Is the eigenvector space any better space for represantation of the temperature distribution?
- it reduces problem size by approx. 1000 times
- it reduces simulation time by 1000 times
- allows to automatically run 1-D simulations if just one eigenmode is set by the user
- it is purely mathematical reduction (the model is physics based, not data based)
- it detects all nonuniformities in thermal properties of the components.
Detailed Validation and a Pilot Project with your Company?
Very careful validation is a must for any advanced engineering numerical simulation software. We do it in multiple ways:
- we do detailed numerical verification of all simulation results and mathematical solutions, energy balances etc.
- we have an NDA signed with one of top level German technical universities - we carry out realistic validation against experimental measurements of a real battery.
- we work in pilot projects with our first customers where we take care of the introduction of the software and convergence of the simulation results against the experimental investigation of our customer.
Are you interested to also become the customer for which we carry out detailed validation on your design? Contact us below.
User Story
Valeo is a multinational Tier-1 automotive supplier based in France. The company provides a wide range of products to auto manufacturers and after-markets. In one of their manufacturing facilities, they routinely design frontal radiators. In this process, they have been using the standard CFD package for modeling of the process of heating up of the new designs. It provided high-fidelity results – the discrepancy between the simulations and the manufacturer’s experiments was less than 0.5%! However, this approach had several drawbacks. A single simulation involved the work of 100 computing cores for 36-48 hours, which was a huge cost. Preparation of the geometry was also very time-consuming (CAD in 3D + meshing). The entire design cycle, although well established and validated, was 14-days-long.
It was necessary to accelerate the design workflow. But it was impossible unless some parts of the process were simplified.
QuickerSim delivered a dedicated application for simulating heat transfer in the radiator using specifically tailored model (not available in standard CFD packages). Such a solution did not require CAD geometry and mesh generation as the shape was parameterized with a few parameters and the radiator surrogate was build automatically. The calculations also lasted much less – it took only 45 minutes for a single desktop processor to complete the job. The accuracy of the calculation turned out to be 2%, what is acceptable in most cases.
What were the results? The project cycle has been shortened from 14 to 4 days, and over 80% of cases are currently being analyzed using our solution! The costs of licenses and electricity have also been reduced.
Become a Partner
We are open to cooperate with both commercial and technical partners. We are strongly interested in your contact if you have background in the emobility and good network of contacts in the automotive industry and would like to become our sales representative for any of the markets in the EU countries, the US or Asia. If you think, you can be succesful in bringing many new prospective customers and sell licenses, do not hesitate to contact us below.
If you are a company, instutute, research institution or a similar entity with displayed experience in the technical investigation of batteries, battery cells etc. (especially in respect to their thermal properties) contact us. We are gathering opportunities and building a network of contacts around us to bring more and more technical value to our customers.