Fireproof, thermal insulation and light-weight material for EV battery protection

Keeping the battery safe and sound has become one of the biggest concerns of new energy vehicles.

There are 4 types of new energy vehicles: hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), battery electric vehicles (BEV, including solar vehicles), fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) and vehicles of other new energy sources (high-efficiency energy storage devices, like supercapacitors, flywheels and so on). In 2021, 3.521 million EV were sold in China, a year-on-year increase of 1.6 times, ranking first in the world for seven consecutive years. While with the increasing of sales number, the vehicles’ safety issues are also becoming increasingly prominent.

According to the statistics, there were over 3,000 fire incidents caused by EV across the country in 2021. Most of the incidents were caused by the failures of power batteries. EV battery packs are usually composed of multiple single battery modules. Situations like mechanical damage, thermal shock, internal short circuit, long-term and continuously frequent fast-charging in an environment of high temperature, etc. may lead to "thermal runaway" of individual battery module. Then heat spreading to other modules, causing the temperature of the surrounding single cells to rise rapidly to 500 to 1000 °C. Which eventually lead to the catastrophic consequences of the overall combustion and explosion of the battery pack. This is truly a serious potential safety hazards.

At present, the fireproof materials for battery packs of new energy vehicles are mainly fireproof felt material, such as heat insulation blankets, mica boards, ultra-fine glass wool, high-silica cotton felts, etc. Although the fireproof blanket can effectively prevent the heat from spreading, control the direction of the fire, and delay the heat diffusion time, the use of the fireproof blankets also bring about weight problem, poor heat dissipation performance, and limitations in the design and construction process. Which hinder the development of lightweight automobiles. Therefore, materials of light weight and excellent flame-retardant are the first choice for the EV battery protection.

As to this purpose, #Shincell’s supercritical foamed #MPP and #FR-MPP are used as battery buffer for new energy batteries. It has excellent properties such as lightweight, low thermal conductivity, good cushioning performance, flame-retardant without toxic gas, nonabsorbency, high volume resistivity and Long-term aging resistance.

At the moment, we are working with BYD for its demand of light-weight and flame-retardant protective materials.

From #Shincell 

Below shows how a #non-crosslinked foam sheet is made by supercritical foaming technology. In the whole process, ONLY CO2 and N2 are used as blowing agent.

1. Raw material extrusion to solid sheet

2. Solid sheet saturation

3. Foaming under certain temperature and pressure

#Protectivefoam #supercriticalfoaming #lightweight #fireproof