Enhancing the safety of electric vehicles through HPC

With the introduction of the Singapore Green Plan 2030, the Singapore government has set ambitious targets to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. In order to reach this goal, various green initiatives are being implemented, one of which is Singapore’s aim to operate a fully electric and hybrid fleet of 10,000 vehicles by 2030 and to achieve the vision of 100% cleaner energy vehicles by 2040.

Electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion battery (LIB) have high electrical energy densities and run the risk of thermal runaway (TR) under conditions like overcharging, superheated working environments, collision, and crashing. Therefore, it is important to predict the safety rick of LIBs under a series of abuse conditions such as over-charging and discharging, to propose reliable thermal management and cooling strategies.

The Energy Innovation Laboratory (EIL) at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Department of Mechanical Engineering, led by Professor Zhang Huangwei, is leveraging on NSCC’s ASPIRE 2A supercomputing resources to actively develop a BatteryFoam solver package based on the open-source OpenFOAM® platform. The group’s primary objective is to leverage BatteryFoam to carry out computational studies on multiphysical processes of LIBs, including electrochemical reactions, electrical parameter variation, thermodynamic processes, and the critical thermal runaway investigation and mitigation.