Innovative Design Concept for the Safety of Battery Housing

Abstract

The automotive production is a very energy- and resource-intensive industry. For that reason, it is important to rethink many structures from the state of the art with the aim of generating a more environment-friendly future, for example by means of circular economy. In order to achieve this aim, a vehicle platform with a long service lifetime is required. The design of future parts should be much more modular to have the possibility of replacing parts easily, if needed. This basic approach is followed in a research project regarding the design of battery housings for electrical vehicles. One of the main research objectives in this project is to reduce the mass while increasing the lifetime and the crash safety of a modular battery housing for electric cars. Especially for the side crash the sill structure is essential. Therefore, an innovative modular concept was developed, which uses multiaxial fiber-reinforced crash tubes. To manufacture these tubes in a close to series production, the pultrusion process was used and technically adapted. This paper presents the findings of the design, process layup, manufacturing steps, and results of an adapted pultrusion process to produce load adjusted crash tubes made of fiber-reinforced plastics (FRP).