Simulating Thermal Behavior of a Wound Battery Cell

General Questions
1

Hi all,

I’m trying to simulate the heating of a spirally wound battery cell (basically ~8 layers of foil wrapped onto itself), and I’m running into issues when trying to mesh the geometry. I tried sweep meshing, but the results don’t look right.

I was thinking about unrolling the geometry and somehow replicating the thermal behavior of the wound version using tie constraints or contacts, but I’m not sure how to best go about this in PrePoMax, or if that is even required/the best idea.

Has anyone here done something similar or has an idea how to approach this? I haven’t worked on this kind of problem before, so any advice or ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Kilian

2

Since you can’t use axisymmetry here, how about shell elements for the thin layers ? This will be much easier to mesh (even if it’s internally expanded to solids anyway). Unless you simplify it further and use e.g. equivalent layers as proposed in some research papers.

3

Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll definitely look into it. I’ve been considering simplification, but apart from merging the 8-layer stack into some sort of “metamaterial,” I’m not sure how to simplify the model further without losing what I assume are important thermal characteristics.