Understanding thermal runaway in cells under electric vehicle drive profile (Indian conditions)
Principal Investigator
Prof. Aravind Kumar Chandiran
Objective
- Investigate EV battery thermal runaway under Indian operating conditions to identify failure triggers and guide safer battery use.
Description
- The project aims at creating a thermal runaway user facility for studying the explosion properties of batteries used in electric vehicles. India has wide variety of vehicle segments and range of operational conditions. This complicates the thermal runaway in batteries. It is essential to test batteries under the real operational scenario (mechanical, thermal and electrical stresses) and understand their efficacy to maintain the safety. While this provides the limit of operation of cells, it also gives indicators to reprogramme the algorithm of battery operation for predicting the failures ahead of time. Considering the necessity of testing cells under vehicle operational conditions, it is proposed to (i) design and develop an explosion facility for studying battery thermal runaway under different stress conditions, including electrical, thermal and mechanical stresses, (ii) test different form factors of cells under standard drive profiles like WLTC, MIDC, FUDS and custom profiles that shall be provided by partners to create a correlation between the drive profile and thermal runaway, and (iii) creation of strategy paper (white papers/concept notes) based on the investigation to provide direction on how to approach the battery thermal runaway.
Impact
- 0