The electric vehicle industry incepted and matured many years back with the arrival of reputed companies in this space such as Tesla, NIO, Nikola, Rivian and many more. Surprisingly the space has been dominated by the Start’Ups. The current trend seems revolutionary as more and more EV vehicles keep showing up on roads. This trend is being fueled by many factors such as more expensive fossil fuels, global uncertainty on supply side of fossil fuels, global efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions to save the planet and many more.  However, electrifying mode of transportation is not as simple as just flipping a switch. It takes a lot more to bring this technology to the market.

The time to market factor has squeezed in a lot in EV lifecycle management. The engineers had almost a century to develop Internal Combustion engines. However, in case of electric vehicles, the cycle has been shortened to a decade.

The system is much more complicated. In internal combustion engines, the source of power is a trivial hydrocarbon that resides within the engine. In electric engines, the source of power is a battery that in itself is another electrical system integrated with the electric engine.

The optimal design must satisfy multiple objectives such as performance, efficiency. Weight, noise, safety and electromagnetic compliance. The task is multiphysical and multi disciplinary in nature that includes design explorations and optimizations. Once designed, the system must be verified against the targets set by the multi body systems engineering.

In addition to the electric drive, the battery is an equally important component of the vehicle as it’s a power house for the electric drive. These devices are very temperature sensitive which means their power output and life varies a lot with the change in temperature. Modeling a battery requires a Multiphysics as well as multiscale approach. Dassault systems is working to provide solutions that can connect mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical aspects of battery at cell, module and packing level.

Having said that, many design challenges of IC engine vehicles still remain applicable in the EV space as well. These include light weight engineering, optimal aerodynamics for lower drag, noise reduction and many more.

Please contact us to learn more about the application of SIMULIA in electric vehicle design and development that helps engineers to overcome challenges and innovate faster in this space.