Enhanced Battery Pack for Electric Vehicle: Noise Reduction and Increased Stiffness

Vibration and the noise through vibration have always been major topics for the design of vehicles. An electric vehicle presents different challenges to a conventional driven vehicle, as a combustion engine produces different exciter frequencies. In this work, the Finite Element (FE) Optimisation software OptiStruct [1] was used to optimise the battery pack design to raise the natural frequencies of the battery housing above the range of model vehicle exciter frequencies. The new design increased the stiffness of the battery pack. Additionally, there was a reduction in wall thickness and a corresponding weight reduction of almost 20%.