Co-design multi-objective 3D optimization methodology for battery modules: An active air-cooling study case

To increase safety, performance and lifetime of the battery motive applications, the battery packs must be
optimized to meet various application specific requirements. These are typically expressed as volumetric
and gravimetric boundaries that should be optimized without compromising the energy and power capabilities
as well as the thermal management of the battery cells. Battery pack design hence becomes a
challenging task to achieve energy and cost-efficiency throughout vehicle’s lifetime. This time consuming
process that typically is addressed with trial-error and user-based experienced cannot converge to
global optimal solutions while rarely exploring the whole design space. In this study, we validate a novel
methodology that automatizes the battery pack thermo-mechanical design based on a three-dimensional
(3D) co-design framework for Lithium-ion battery modules. Accounting an air-cooled study case, the
proposed framework performs more than 250 design evaluations in relative short time for the whole
available design space, ensuring the global optimal configuration of the battery module, with respect to 3
thermal and 1 mechanical constraints. As a result, the optimal battery module that is derived, is now built
and experimentally tested to validate its performance with both static, pulse and dynamic loading profiles.