Development of a New Flammability Test Method: Enabling Material-Level Evaluation of Polymeric Materials for Electric Vehicle Battery Enclosures
2022-01-0846
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- The drive for reducing the weight and cost of battery systems for electric vehicles has led to continued interest in metal-to-plastic substitution and mixed-material designs for battery enclosures. However, the extreme performance requirements, such as thermal runaway mitigation, pose a challenge for plastic materials to meet. In an effort to design a cost-effective, lightweight next-generation battery enclosure while meeting the latest requirements, the Materials Development Department at the Hyundai-Kia America Technical Center has screened material performance of several plastic types. A new thermal runaway test set-up was developed with support from Underwriters Laboratory (UL), to create a scaled-down test representative of a full battery assembly in real-world conditions. The objective of this development was to provide a comprehensive matrix of test data that can inform material selection and design of next-generation battery enclosures based on performance requirements and assembly architecture. For this project, the test matrix included both thermoplastic and thermoset materials, with discontinuous and continuous glass fiber reinforcement. Preliminary tests have shown promising results, determined by yield at peak pressure, indicating that both thermoplastic and thermoset materials could meet performance requirements, depending on additional system features such as seals, vents, and assembly free volume. This test set-up has demonstrated a capable and repeatable new method to efficiently screen material-level performance. Currently, full-scale prototype testing of the leading candidate materials are in progress at the Hyundai-Kia R&D headquarters. This will allow the correlation of material-level results to the expected performance of an assembly-level test. Next steps include further optimization of the test set-up, and documentation in a corresponding UL Standard to facilitate material development and evaluation throughout the automotive industry.
- Citation
- Nummy, A., "Development of a New Flammability Test Method: Enabling Material-Level Evaluation of Polymeric Materials for Electric Vehicle Battery Enclosures," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0846, 2022, .