During battery design, performance requirements are primarily driven by the
application. As many of them are conflicting, you’ll be continuously trading off aspects like power, energy density, safety, cost, and many others. Besides, as the battery is the embodiment of the energy transition and e-mobility, sustainability is becoming an increasingly important additional constraint.

Can you master this complexity? Are you keeping up with this tangle of requirements, setting the right priorities during every design stage? Are you consistently meeting your customers’ expectations, while bringing affordable, safe solutions to the market, compliant with all standards and regulations, and this as quickly as possible?

Achieve and prove design excellence by adopting a collaborative, quality-driven
approach. Keep everyone continuously focused on the requirements. Be accountable by keeping track of all decisions that are being made throughout the entire battery design program, including those that relate to change requests. Consistently deliver on promise and thereby build a solid brand reputation in the rapidly growing battery market.

Especially when a design program is a partnership between battery and application teams, like from a vehicle, e-aircraft, or storage systems manufacturer, it can be challenging to get everyone aligned. As all participants will be trading off requirements coming from different angles, you must set clear goals and priorities upfront, and impose those on everyone.

Balance application-driven requirements

Application teams will insist on pushing the performance limits. Manufacturers of electric vehicles, for example, urgently need improved range and faster charging. But some conflicts are unsolvable. To handle more power, you must reduce internal cell resistance, which typically requires adding material. This extra weight negatively impacts energy density. You will have to compromise, thereby also considering all other aspects, including temperature range, cycle life, safety, cost, and more.

Comply with sustainability policies

Ongoing initiatives for making batteries more sustainable and ethical further complicate this exercise. During design, those will primarily translate into constraints regarding the materials you can use in cells. Various public policies are being conceived, for example the battery passport that will become mandatory in the European Union (EU) by 2026. To support such regulatory instruments, you must track all battery-related information.

Meet safety standards

Also eliminating safety-related incidents must be a top priority. Especially today, with social media, any issue can take enormous proportions, irreparably damage your brand, even impede further adoption of the application your battery is running. Still, to prepare for the worst, you must systematically document and track all standards followed, and decisions made during design. This will enable you to present proof points of good practice in case of litigation.

Siemens helps you consistently deliver compliant batteries that exceed your customers’ expectations. With Siemens Xcelerator™, our comprehensive and integrated software and services portfolio that is accessible as a cloud-based SaaS solution, you will find all the necessary components to achieve and prove design excellence.

Let requirements drive design

Keep everyone continuously focused on the requirements. Capture, share and maintain them in an integrated, battery-specific repository that participates in standard product lifecycle management services. Link requirements to tasks and resources to drive priorities, for continuous verification and validation, and to study the impact and the risk of change.

Foster multidisciplinary design

Boost efficiency and eliminate data inconsistency by using a shared repository with up-to-date information for all verification activities across the entire battery design ecosystem. Generate a multi-domain bill of materials (BOM). Leverage multidisciplinary data in powerful visualization and digital mock-up capabilities to detect and resolve issues before they happen.

Embrace change

See change as an opportunity. Respond quickly, accurately, comprehensively, and safely to evolving requirements. Drive execution using a certified, systematic approach that helps everyone downstream understand how they will be impacted, so they can anticipate. And track all decisions to create visibility across the battery design ecosystem on how products, issues, and improvements evolve.

Provide traceability

Deploy data continuity between the various design stages and teams but keep track of all relevant changes and decisions that are being made. Document verification activities regarding the requirements as well as industry safety and quality standards, and keep them available for future reference, or to learn from your design experience.