Henkel’s digital battery simulation team accelerates EV battery design and development, cutting costly iterations and physical testing for faster market readiness

Henkel’s new battery simulation team slashes time-to-market 

Electric vehicle battery design and development has traditionally taken a long time and a huge amount of resources. As a safety-critical component, and one that is crucial to the operation of the vehicle, the battery must undergo comprehensive testing and is often subject to numerous iterations of material reformulation and design adjustments to enhance performance and safety. But one company has found a way to significantly speed up the process. 

”As a global leader in material solutions, Henkel works with many automotive OEMs all over the world, and each of these companies has a different electric vehicle programme”

Specialist material supplier Henkel is leveraging a new suite of digital modelling and simulation solutions to optimise battery design and development. By bringing this expertise in-house, the company is able to provide customers with robust and reliable data that can optimise the design phase without the need for extensive physical testing. The result is a much faster and efficient development for the customer, saving time and resources.  

Smart streamlining  

“Not only are we offering materials that help with structure, but we are also playing a crucial role in the safety, sustainability, and reliability of the battery,” explains Keon Lee, senior manager of battery solutions at Henkel. “We have a big impact, and that is why we started approaching our customers with a pioneering co-collaboration approach and have created our own battery simulation team.”  

Prior to creating this team, Henkel would provide its customers with material solutions for various different applications, and the customer would spend a great deal of time and resources in testing and validating material performance at the component level, assessing mechanical, thermal, safety, and other critical aspects in dedicated test environments. Results would slowly be collected, and Henkel would receive feedback that would commonly necessitate reformulations, which would in turn require further validation tests. The process was arduous and fraught with challenges.  

Seeing an opportunity to streamline, the company recruited experts in the fields of automotive battery modelling and simulation, adding to its already extensive knowledge base, and created a new team to rapidly generate and deliver key data to support and streamline the design process for customers.

“We can now show the performance of products in a virtual form, demonstrating their capabilities before they have been physically sampled,” explains Zamaan Sadeghi, Henkel’s manager of engineering and advanced testing. “The customer can better optimise the design and greatly reduce the time it takes for development cycles. We have also massively saved time and effort inside our company by streamlining the test campaigns, simply because we don’t need to physically formulate every time we do a test. It flips the classical design approach on its head.” 

One of the ways in which it is very different from the classical design approach is the foundation of digital analysis and the prediction of enormous amounts of data, enabling faster and more accurate material formulation. Sadeghi also says that leveraging digital solutions can help identify patterns in material behaviour, offering further information and potentially useful ideas for the creation of future products.  

Flexibility for the customer 

As a global leader in material solutions, Henkel works with many automotive OEMs all over the world, and each of these companies has a different electric vehicle programme. Furthermore, as the automotive battery is not standardised, they use different types of battery builds and chemistries, with varying capabilities and performance characteristics. As a result, the relationship between Henkel and its customers can vary drastically depending on their needs and ambitions.

There is never a dull moment, says Sadeghi, as customer requests are always different and uniquely challenging. This may involve simply providing a material data card that captures the behaviour of a specific adhesive layer in a simulated environment. With this data, the customer can accurately model Henkel’s materials at the component level, integrating them into their own simulations. 

“However, sometimes the customer would like us to be involved in the early stages of the design process, and would like to share their models with us so we can work on it together,” Sadeghi clarifies. “And, through our simulations, we might identify the potential to provide them with a certain material, allowing them to reduce design weight while ensuring mechanical durability or enhancing thermal performance. It ultimately depends on the customer’s needs, but we remain flexible and can support various stages of the process.” 

All about speed 

At the moment, a handful of trusted partners have been selected by Henkel to trial the new modelling and simulation solutions. Lee reveals that less than five companies are involved, and as with any new technology, there are on-going alterations and improvements. “But the feedback from our partners has been excellent so far,” he says, with customers already seeing that they can greatly reduce their time-to-market goals.  

“And this is the crucial aspect: they really need to speed up because of how fast Chinese OEMs are moving,” Lee asserts. “Nowadays, vehicle development takes between 36 to 40 months in Europe, but in China it is around 24 months for some of the pioneering groups. By being smart and using digital innovation, the European companies may be able to catch up to their Chinese competitors.” 

“The simulation is directly related to design concepts, so the customer can optimise the design as quickly as possible”

- Zamaan Sadeghi, Manager Engineering and Adv. Testing, Henkel

Sadeghi agrees, but stresses the need for companies to have a “full and comprehensive overview of material performance” from an early stage in the battery design. He suggests that without this, estimations and guesswork will inevitably lead to more time and resources being spent.  

“With our new digital solutions, we can accurately address the needs of the customer, eliminating any time-consuming and unnecessary steps,” Lee emphasises. “The simulation is directly related to design concepts, so the customer can optimise the design as quickly as possible. It is all about speed, and to be faster you have to work smarter. You need big data behind you. And Henkel is ready to work smart to make everything faster.”  

Find out more by contacting Henkel, here.