the tech
Images courtesy of ANSYS
“
with CFD,” he says, “but they can’t afford to do that. They really need the system-level modeling for the pack.” ANSYS joined CAEBAT despite having no software products that specifically target batteries, nor does it plan to make such a product. “That may be surprising to some people,” Collins says, “but really the secret of ANSYS’s success has been figuring out what’s the root engineering and simulation that needs to be done, and what’s the commonality between batteries, electronic circuits, internal combustion engines, and all the different applications that can be provided in a way that’s useful to a lot of people. Having said that, we also have ways to tailor or verticalize some of our general tools to make them easier and more automated for batteries. There’s this balance between the generic and highly verticalized software that we’re pursuing. One of the ways we do that is to utilize the scripting and user-programming capabilities of our products, to quickly create a ‘killer app’ for predicting battery performance.” The core of ANSYS’s product suites is called ANSYS Workbench™, and the company’s other products are based on it and connected to it. For example, there’s ANSYS Mechanical™ for structural analysis, ANSYS Fluent® for fluid flow and thermal analysis, ANSYS Simplorer® for systems-level simulations, and many others. ANSYS was attractive to the DOE as a player in CAEBAT because these general-purpose software tools are already in widespread use, backed by ANSYS expert support, at most of the world’s major automotive, battery, and electronics companies. Collins explains, “battery breakthroughs are going to require research and development involving several disciplines and scales. For example, if you’re interested in thermal, you might have thermal stress concerns, or on the other hand, you might be interested to drill into the electrochemistry inside the battery. If you’re interested in the very coarse-grained, pack-level results as opposed to a very fine-grained result inside an individual battery electrode, we have tools to do really the whole spectrum.”
...the secret of ANSYS’s success has been figuring out what’s the root engineering and simulation that needs to be done, and what’s the commonality between batteries, electronic circuits, internal combustion engines...
”
Within the CAEBAT project, Collins says, “we’re driving the core products forward in ways that are necessary to handle the right physics for the batteries, and also trying to customize them in a very targeted way for batteries, with scripting and programmability.” For CAEBAT, the DOE is not focusing on molecularlevel simulations that materials scientists looking for different electrode compounds may be interested in. And that is not what ANSYS does, either. “We are focused on macroscopic design,” Collins says. “How you would lay out the individual stack of electrodes and how you would package it in its cell. Further, how you would cool those cells and package those in a module or a pack for an electric vehicle.” With its current suite of tools and those that it is developing through CAEBAT, ANSYS expects to predict most of the important factors for automotive batteries, including volume, weight, energy density, optimal operating temperature, lifetime, and safety concerns, such as reaction to crash events and electrical abuse. They can also simulate a drive cycle and a pulse charge or discharge. The one thing ANSYS software does not directly predict is cost, but that factor will come as part of the larger collaborative project. Collins explains that overall, CAEBAT is asking “how can we make better performance batteries and at the same time bring the cost down to where it’s really competitive in the marketplace when they put them in electric vehicles?” As ANSYS incrementally releases its simulation software resulting from the CAEBAT project over the next couple of years, we’ll begin to see just how useful and cost-effective it can be to model high-tech products like batteries in order to speed up development. Meanwhile, software simulation will be racing against real-world rapid materials synthesis to see which method reaps the largest gains in battery development.
OCT/NOV 2012 33