For current electric vehicles, batteries are employed only as an energy source. Due to safety concerns, the space for battery storage is co-allocated with passenger space, which would constrain the design for the vehicle. An architectured multifunctional battery-structure material, namely Granular Battery Assembly (GBA), has been proposed by Tsutsui et al., 2014. Such a material system utilizes the deformation of sacrificing tubes to dissipate impact energy and protect the battery cells, thereby allowing the batteries to be placed in the front crumple zone of an electric vehicle, while also ensuring occupant safety. The primary focus of this study was vehicle level design analysis of GBA for application in an electric vehicle. A parametric study was performed to determine suitable characteristics of the GBA system for installation in a vehicle. To reduce computational cost, a homogenized material was used to represent GBA in the finite element model of the vehicle. Frontal crash simulation of a vehicle with GBA placed in crumple zone was performed on LS-DYNA platform.The crash response was used to demonstrate the utility of GBA mechanism to keep the batteries and passengers safe. The incorporation of GBA into an electric vehicle would allow for battery space to be decoupled from passenger space, thereby increasing the vehicle design freedom. Use of the crumple zone for battery storage would also result in increasing the available battery space.
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