Better performance, shorter charging times?
The debate over range has dominated the electric vehicle sector for years. In development, however, another factor is increasingly taking center stage: thermal management. With 800-volt architectures, ever-higher charging powers, and rising power densities, the thermal loads on batteries, power electronics, and electric drives are growing significantly. The real challenge lies in managing the resulting heat—sustainably, efficiently, and safely.
Changing requirements are transforming the development process: cooling concepts are no longer developed as an afterthought but now influence a vehicle’s architecture from the outset. This is because every design decision—from the cooling channel to the heat exchanger to the arrangement of individual components—has a direct impact on performance, service life, and fast-charging capability.
Is traditional development reaching its limits?
“Thermal management is still often viewed as a standalone discipline,” says Dipl.-Ing. (TU) Stefan Merkle, managing partner of Merkle CAE Solutions GmbH. “In reality, flow, heat transfer, material properties, and control strategies constantly influence one another. It is precisely these interactions that determine whether a system will function reliably during subsequent operation.”
Physical tests remain indispensable. Their drawback, however, is that they usually only answer the question of how a system that has already been developed behaves. Critical temperature spikes, local hotspots, or unfavorable flow distributions often only become apparent once prototypes have already been built, at which point making changes becomes costly.
Making Decisions Before Hardware Is Developed
This is where simulation-based development comes into play. Modern multiphysics models combine CFD simulation, thermodynamics, and 1D system simulation into a comprehensive digital system. This allows cooling circuits, heat exchangers, battery modules, and power electronics to be analyzed together as early as the initial stages of development.
A typical example is the design of a battery cooling circuit. While traditional tests examine individual operating conditions, virtual models can evaluate a wide variety of load cases within a short time: from fast charging to high ambient temperatures to dynamic driving cycles. Developers can identify early on where hotspots develop, which components limit the thermal balance, and which design changes have the greatest impact.
Innovation starts with better decisions
The true added value of modern simulation lies not only in shortening development times. It transforms the quality of technical decisions. Variants can be objectively compared as early as the concept phase; conflicting goals involving installation space, efficiency, weight, and cooling capacity become apparent early on; and development risks are significantly reduced.
Especially against the backdrop of ever-shorter innovation cycles, thermal management is thus becoming a strategic success factor for electric mobility. Companies that understand thermal relationships early on and validate them digitally lay the foundation for more powerful, more robust, and more economical generations of vehicles.
