Plug in battery electric vehicle (BeV) – design and integration of battery package (part A)

Abstract

The purpose of this report is to document the design, fabrication and assembly of the Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) Battery Package for AY 2016/2017.

The Battery Package Design Phase started in AY 2013/2014, subsequently 1 Battery Sub-Module and the Central Module were fabricated in AY 2014/2015. To evaluate the effectiveness of the Battery Package Design, simulation and testing work were carried out in AY 2015/2016. For AY 2016/2017, the tasked was to manufacture the Battery Package which consist of 6 Battery Sub-Module and 1 Battery Central Module. The aim of the project was to made changes and improvements to the existing design to allow for the manufacturing of the battery package in-house at the Innovation@MAE lab, to keep the fabrication cost affordable. The project team was led by a project officer and consist of 2 Final Year Project (FYP) students from the Mechanical Engineering Course and 2 FYP students from the Electrical Engineering Course. During the design phase, the author focus on developing the design improvements for the cooling channel while the other Mechanical Engineering FYP student focus on the design improvements for the structure of the Battery Sub-Module. This report shows the development of the Battery Sub-Module Design consisting of the cooling channel conceptual design, concept evaluation and final design. The ANSYS simulation was carried out for the cooling channel final design to evaluate the cooling channel effectiveness in heat dissipation.

The fabrication and assembly phase for the Battery Package takes up a huge portion of the time spent on the BEV project and it was done together as a team. Almost all components of the Battery Package were manufacture at the Innovation@MAE lab thus the fabrication phase was a time consuming process. The fabrication and assembly process was also hindered by several obstacles and the author had to overcome these problems by altering fabrication methods and design of the Battery Package components. This report explains the crucial fabrication process for the cooling channel using the CNC Router and the sequence of assembly for the battery package.