Safety Design for Electric Vehicle Battery Mounting Methods by Using Computer Simulation

The case of an electric vehicle, where a motor system can be substituted for a combustion engine comprises a very fascinating power source which is environmentally sustainable. However, due to the low power performance of the motor and battery source, the weight reduction of the electric vehicle for the increase of the efficiency is necessary. In present study, the stiffness analysis was conducted to evaluate the safety of the battery mounted parts. For these, the CAE (computer aided engineering) simulation of the full vehicle (Metro by Geo Co.= base model) model was performed. The stiffness enhancing design for evaluating how satisfied the stiffness of the surrounding structure in the battery mounting after dynamic stiffness analysis. In order to improve the stiffness of the base model, the design change idea was proposed. Based on this, the new structure of the floor was suggested to mount the battery into the vehicle. The new concept model is to present a new design direction with integrated BIW (body in white) that can replace from the discharged battery to the newly charged battery easily and it can be helpful to the future design of the advanced electric vehicle. To confirm the possibility of BIW weight reduction, the structure section of overlapped portions and its thickness thinning was studied. From these results, it was confirmed that the BIW design should be possible which had high stiffness through the newly proposed concept.