Abstract
Laser micro-welding is increasingly being used to produce electrically conductive joints within a battery module of an automotive battery pack. To understand the joint strength of these laser welds at an early design stage, micro-joints are required to be modelled. Additionally, structural modelling of the battery module along with the electrical interconnects is important for understanding the crash safety of electric vehicles. Fusion zone based micro-modelling of laser welding is not a suitable approach for structural modelling due to the computational inefficiency and the difficulty of integrating with the module model. Instead, a macro-model which computationally efficient and easy to integrate with the structural model can be useful to replicate the behaviour of the laser weld. A macro-modelling approach was adopted in this paper to model the mechanical behaviour of laser micro-weld. The simulations were based on 5 mm diameter circular laser weld and developed from the experimental data for both the lap shear and T-peel tests. This modelling approach was extended to obtain the joint strengths for 3 mm diameter circular seams, 5 mm and 10 mm linear seams. The predicted load–displacement curves showed a close agreement with the test data.
Highlights
Electric vehicles (EVs), hybrid/plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs/PHEVs) are increasingly being used to replace traditional fossil fuel-based automotive vehicles in order to minimise the generation of greenhouse gases [1,2,3]
T-peel samples were prepared with a 5 mmarediameter circular seam we the representative tab to cylindrical cell terminal interconnects, laser micro-welding was placed at the centre of the overlap region
The laser micro-welding was performed using the process parameters described in Section 2.2 and Table 4
Summary
Electric vehicles (EVs), hybrid/plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs/PHEVs) are increasingly being used to replace traditional fossil fuel-based automotive vehicles in order to minimise the generation of greenhouse gases [1,2,3]. Structural FE models are being developed to represent the battery cells [9], battery modules, and subsequently the pack behaviour at micro and/or macro levels [10,11] Mechanical modelling of these modules is important for safety performance studies to understand the behaviour in, for example in the event of a crash or module. Zain-ul-abdein et al [23] investigated the effect of metallurgical phase transformations upon the residual stresses and distortion induced by laser beam welding in a T-joint configuration using the finite element method Such three-dimensional weld pool geometry-based laser joint models or heat source are difficult to incorporate/place within full battery module/pack models. Trattnig and Leitgeb [11] emphasised the importance of joint strength and failure of joints imental laser micro-joining to produce dissimilar joints; and (iii) verify and valid during battery module modelling for crash safety simulation. In this study macro-modelling approach has been adopted to model the battery interconnects to allow easy integration with a larger
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