Comparing High-Performance Computing Techniques for Modeling Structural Impact on Battery Cells

In this study, we have investigated feasibility of using commercial explicit finite element code LS-DYNA on massively parallel super-computing cluster for accurate modeling of structural impact on battery cells. Physical and numerical lateral impact tests have been conducted on cylindrical cells using a flat rigid drop cart in a custom-built drop test apparatus. The main component of cylindrical cell, jellyroll, is a layered spiral structure which consists of thin layers of electrodes and separator. Two numerical approaches were considered: (1) homogenized model of the cell and (2) heterogeneous (full) 3-D cell model. In the first approach, the jellyroll was considered as a homogeneous material with an effective stress-strain curve obtained through experiments. In the second model, individual layers of anode, cathode and separator were accounted for in the model, leading to extremely complex and computationally expensive finite element model. To overcome limitations of desktop computers, high-performance computing (HPC) techniques on a HPC cluster were needed in order to get the results of transient simulations in a reasonable solution time. We have compared two HPC methods used for this model is shared memory parallel processing (SMP) and massively parallel processing (MPP). Both the homogeneous and the heterogeneous models were considered for parallel simulations utilizing different number of computational nodes and cores and the performance of these models was compared. This work brings us one step closer to accurate modeling of structural impact on the entire battery pack that consists of thousands of cells.