CFD

GitHub Repository CFD-based battery simulation is powerful and routinely impractical. OpenFOAM can model the coupled thermal-flow behavior of a battery pack in detail that lumped models can’t touch. It can resolve cell-to-cell temperature gradients, coolant channel flow distribution, and transient heat propagation through complex pack geometries. It can also take an experienced CFD engineer a day to set up a single case, another day to run it, and significant effort to extract anything useful from the output. ...

Fire safety simulation has a problem that’s easier to describe than to solve: the CFD model needs material properties — thermal conductivity, specific heat, ignition temperature, char oxidation rates — but these properties aren’t available in standard databases for most real materials, and direct measurement is expensive and often impractical. The alternative is to go backwards. You have experimental fire test data. You have a CFD model. Find the material properties that make the model match the experiment. ...

The naive approach to aerodynamic optimization is obvious: run CFD, check drag, adjust geometry, run CFD again. Repeat until satisfied. This works if you have a few design variables and a lot of patience. It doesn’t work if you have a high-dimensional design space, a CFD solver that takes hours per run, and an optimization algorithm that wants to query thousands of points. The solution is to decouple the two problems. ...

Most thermal modelling projects in automotive spend the majority of their time not solving physics — but configuring it. Setting up geometry representations, mapping cell sensor signals to Simulink ports, assigning material properties, wiring the cooling boundary conditions from CFD into the thermal solver. The same steps, repeated for every new battery variant, every new pack geometry, every new cooling configuration. The Battery Thermal Model Configurator was built to eliminate that overhead — and to produce something better than what the manual process was generating. ...