battery cooling for ultra-fast charging.

Collaboration with  InMotion, a student team from Eindhoven University of Technology. 

InMotion is a student team from Eindhoven University of Technology where students are working voluntarily on the future of mobility. The goal of InMotion is to promote electrical cars and make them more standard by making the charging process of an electrical car as fast and convenient as refuelling a petrol car.

The concept and main challenge is Electric Refuelling. The technical integration of fast electric refuelling forms the basis of the student team, combined with integration into a racing car. The InMotion team will showcase the potential of Electric Refuelling in endurance racing as this will pose as the toughest conditions for a car to be tested under. Therefore, the dream of the team is to participate in the 24 Hours of Le mans race, with a fully electric endurance race car.

InMotion

The team was formed in 2009 when three students decided to participate in the Formula Student competition with a bio-ethanol race car, which at the time was also the first in the Netherlands. After graduation, the dream and ambition to create the most innovative race car in the world grew and InMotion was officially founded. It all started in 2015, with The Fusion, the first fully electric formula car of the team. The Fusion has driven three different electric lap records: on Circuit Zandvoort, TT Circuit Assen, and circuit Zolder, of which the former two are still the record as of today. After The Fusion, The Vision was created and designed as the optimal electric endurance racer. With aerodynamic drag reduced, active aerodynamics introduced and lots of space for batteries.

Currently, the team works on The Revolution, while focussing on the battery pack development, and innovate towards the concept of Electric Refuelling. This car can charge within 12 minutes already! However, InMotion believes this charging time can be reduced even more by creating an effective cooling solution for the battery pack.

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Collaboration between Demcon multiphysics and InMotion

To predict the heat distribution in the cooling solution, InMotion and Demcon are working together on Multiphysics simulations. Demcon multiphysics assists in setting up and running various Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculations. This includes advice on design optimizations based on the achieved computational results.

A vital part of the concept phase of the cooling process for the battery pack are simulations. These allowed for fast iteration to the design and showed how well and if a concept would work. This is especially useful for a student team due to the limited amount of time, the high number of iterations and the limited prototyping budget.

Besides the detailed CFD simulations, Demcon multiphysics also assists with higher level simulations. Problems such as iterating tube sizes on a parallel pressure drop system take much time when a full CFD simulation is performed. Therefore, lumped element models can be used instead. This allows for quick iteration and in combination with the detailed CFD work, a full analysis and optimisation of the system can be done.

The expertise of Demcon multiphysics helps the InMotion team with their design challenge, which will hopefully lead to a successful electrically fast charging car.