An integrated energy absorbing module for battery protection of electric vehicle under lateral pole impact

Abstract

Nowadays, the importance of energy conservation and environmental sustainability issues has led to developments of environmentally friendly products like electric vehicles (EVs). The EVs are not already as widespread as internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) and also the complicated inherent crash behaviour put their crashworthiness at the first development steps. However, besides the battery safety, other major issues such as corresponding vehicle crashworthiness as a consequence of engine and sub-related components elimination and also battery packaging should be addressed. Although before reaching a more specific crash limits for EVs safety evaluation test cases, one could use the ICEV’s conventional crash scenarios for the structural crashworthiness evaluations. In this article, the side pole impact as the severe load case according to ENCAP was introduced and protection of the battery pack is improved by implementing a novel energy absorber element into the body sill side. The analyses have performed based on validated computational simulations. The finite element model of the structure is prepared by ANSA and the simulations carried out via ABAQUS and the non-linear explicit finite element software of PAM-CARSH. The various assessment criteria such as pole intrusion, internal energy, section loads before and after the conversion are analysed in order to find an optimum configuration of the structure for battery protection. Obtained results show a significant enhancement in vehicle crashworthiness performance.