Design and Structural Simulations of a Custom Li-Po Accumulator for Low Range, Lightweight, Single-Seater, Open Cockpit, and Open-Wheeled Racecar

Electric, hybrid, and fuel cell vehicles are the future of the automobile industry, and power source design is one of the most crucial steps in designing these vehicles. This paper aims to design and structurally simulate a custom accumulator—which powers an electric vehicle, for a lightweight, sing...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnergies (Basel) Vol. 15; no. 1; p. 363
Main Authors Khedkar, Nitin, Bhatt, Akul, Kapadia, Dhruval, Chavan, Shantanu, Agarwal, Yash, Abouel Nasr, Emad, Davim, João Paulo, Salunkhe, Sachin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Basel MDPI AG 01.01.2022
Subjects
Accumulators
Automobile industry
Automobile racing
cell chemistry
cell configuration
Deformation
Design
Electric vehicles
Energy
finite element analysis
Fuel technology
Lightweight
Lithium
Manufacturers
Manufacturing
mathematical model
Mathematical models
modal analysis
Packaging
Power management
Power sources
Race cars
Simulation
Software
Vibrational analysis
Vibratory loads
India
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Summary:Electric, hybrid, and fuel cell vehicles are the future of the automobile industry, and power source design is one of the most crucial steps in designing these vehicles. This paper aims to design and structurally simulate a custom accumulator—which powers an electric vehicle, for a lightweight, single-seater formula-style racecar. The work is dependent on the model-based design and CAD model approach. Mathematical modeling on SCILAB is used to model equations to get the characteristics of the accumulator, such as the energy, capacity, current, voltage, state of charge, and discharge rates. The output of this model gives the configuration of the battery pack as several cells in series and parallel to adequately power the tractive system. An accumulator container is designed to safeguard the cells from external impacts and vibrational loads, which otherwise can lead to safety hazards. Following this, the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) performed on the accumulator resulted in maximum peak deformation of 0.56 mm, ensuring the safety check against various external loads. Further, the finer stability of the battery pack was virtually validated after performing the vibrational analysis, resulting in a deformation of 3.5493 mm at a 1760.8 Hz frequency.
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en15010363