Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF
Darmstadt, Germany
Website – Linkedin
Benedict Götz – Benedict.goetz@lbf.fraunhofer.de
Christoph Tamm – christoph.tamm@lbf.fraunhofer.de
Fraunhofer LBF in Darmstadt has stood for the safety and reliability of lightweight structures for 80 years. Today, with its expertise in the areas of structural durability, system reliability, vibration technology and polymer technology, the Institute provides solutions for most important cross-cutting issues of the future: lightweight design, functional integration and cyberphysical mechanical engineering systems. The focus here is on solutions to social challenges such as resource efficiency and emission reduction as well as future mobility, like e-mobility and autonomous, networked driving. Comprehensive skills ranging from data acquisition in real operational field use to data analysis and data interpretation, in addition to deriving specific measures to design and improve material, component and system properties form the basis for this. Customers come from automotive and commercial vehicle construction, railway transport engineering, shipbuilding, aviation, machine and plant construction, power engineering, electrical engineering, medical engineering and the chemical industry. They benefit from the proven expertise of over 400 employees and cutting-edge technology accommodated in more than 11,560 square meters of laboratory and experimental space.
Reliability of complex and expensive systems such as high voltage energy storages for mobile applications is a crucial attribute for market success. In order to investigate and quantify system reliability of energy storages, existing classical development processes and methods must be reviewed and optimized. Participation of Fraunhofer LBF in AccCellBaT is motivated by exploring new approaches for experimental and numerical methods for a more efficient evaluation of the reliability and safety of drivetrain components in the future, thus supporting a time- and cost-optimized development process.
Fraunhofer LBF focuses on methods for evaluating the reliability of high voltage energy storage and its components. For this purpose, we are investigation the experimental vibration testing of high voltage storage systems under multi-physical loads, with the aim of deriving as much information as possible from expensive experimental tests for validation and model verification. Fraunhofer LBF is also working to improve the understanding of cable defect mechanisms in battery applications with advanced digital twins of cables for mechanical and thermal properties. The in-depth knowledge of the defect mechanisms at the relevant operating points of the applications enables the transition from complex finite element models to analytical models for 1D simulation. Already during product design, a digital validation run should be performed in a very short time and a prediction for the lifetime related to a reference design should be made. With reliable digital models and simulation methods, (iterative) hardware testing for mechanical and thermal loads can ideally also be performed entirely in the digital domain.
Reliable systems through efficient and systemic development methods!