Hello, everyone, and welcome to our latest podcast, Reimagining Mobility. I'm here with Chris Meszaros supervisor for AVL. Chris, we want to talk a little bit about batteries, but clearly about thermal management. That's where your expertise comes in. Thermal management is a big topic, I would say. Not necessarily. Everybody talks about everybody talks about batteries, everybody talks about inverters and motors.
But at the end of the day, thermal management is what allows a battery to perform peaks, charging, discharge, whatever it may be, and allows a battery to do what it needs to do, that we have a regular EV or some of those EVs that go from 0 to 60 faster than maybe they should. So tell me a little bit about what is thermal management for those who may be think of it from a traditional sense. What does thermal management mean when it comes to batteries?
So it's similar to what we have with conventional technology, with the combustion engine. It's management of the heat, particularly the cells themselves, keeping the cells cool and managing how that he is pulled away from the battery itself and then dispersed ultimately into the atmosphere. Is he rejected, just like you would have on a normal conventional vehicle? We're talking constantly about battery performance, right?
So clearly, thermal management keeping those batteries in the right temperature range is very critical. But then we also always talk about we have to have lighter vehicles because a lighter EV will go further. So how is that? How do we how do you balance the need for cooling and the need for less weight if you bring fluids in.
And it is counter, I want to say counterintuitive, but right, right now with the industry, we're seeing a lot of interest in immersion cooling and that's which immersion cooling is where the cells themselves are actually submersed in a coolant, a liquid coolant. So the physical coolant is in contact with the outer shell of the battery cell.
But that's kind of counterintuitive from a math standpoint, because then you're adding all of that fluid to the vehicle, which then in turn you have a mass penalty which ultimately impacts your range and your overall performance of the vehicle. So there is a balance. Most, as far as I know, everything that's on the market today does not use immersion technology. They use some form of non direct contact cooling. In most of the cooling system, capacities are significantly less.
And that's part of the reason why, because there's that tradeoff. When it comes to simulation, we always talk about simulation at AVL because we really believe in it, in the power of it. We've invested and we've got our own products in that space. How much does simulation play a role in your daily work? Designing batteries? It plays a big role.
There's things as simple as, let's say, a 1 to 2 day simulation that we can do where where we're looking at the flow restriction in the various coolant past, where the cooling is going to flow through the battery all the way through a month long, maybe longer simulation, where we're looking at what happens when the battery goes into thermal runaway, how that heat expelled and how we ultimately prevent that heat from from going down the line and affecting adjacent cells.
So there's a lot that we do there. And over the years, if you look at it over the years and maybe look at it 3 to 5 years out, you still see lots of growth of being more accurate and more even more correlated to real world when it comes to simulation. Or have we sort of reached a plateau that we now need to wait for the next? I think there'll be more accuracy. I think that it's challenging because not so much with the simplistic flow pressure drop that sort of simulation.
I think we're pretty accurate there. But when it comes to thermal runaway and thermal propagation, there's still a lot of correlation. I think, to be done only because I don't know, though there's a lot of capability for real world testing and things like that. The simulations that we have done have been pretty accurate. And when I say pretty accurate, some of the testing that we've done to correlate that, I would say 90%.
Right. But but there's also the I don't know what word I'm looking for, but but it's not every time a battery goes into thermal runaway, it's not a set in stone method or manner that it does that in. It's random, It's different every time. So until there's enough testing to really understand and correlate what happens every time a cell goes into runaway, there's obviously going to be some accuracy that you're not going to have. Right.
And then let's say you get to that level of accuracy or confidence that, hey, we've seen it quote unquote, all which we never will, but to some degree is then the next fear or the next challenge will be, well, then we're done with with with liquid batteries, and then we go into solid state batteries or different types of chemical composition of batteries, which will then change, obviously, the behavior again, is it a constantly evolving field? I think it will be. I think it will be.
There's a lot of there's a lot of engineering going on, a lot of research going on for different types of batteries. Right. Solid state sodium, you know, so I think it's going to continue to evolve. Is there such a thing as a I don't know. They call sometimes, you know, the holy grail of batteries where you can use your cooling fluid at the same time to to extinguish a thermal runaway. So there's actually things like that.
That part of the reason that immersion in technology is being looked at is because the idea is the claim from some of the manufacturers that produce some of these dielectric that are used for immersion cooling is that if a runaway happens, that the the event is significantly less severe because of the immersion fluid and the ability of it to, I don't want to say instantaneously cool, but significantly cool the things that are coming out of the cell, right? So I guess by Holy Grail.
Yeah, that's the Holy Grail. But the real Holy Grail will be to do that with no mass, right? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks for listening to Reimagine Mobility podcast. If you'd like to episode, please subscribe and tell a friend.