Applications of aluminium hybrid foam sandwiches in battery housings for electric vehicles

Lightweight design is of special importance for purely electrically driven vehicles in order to improve driving range and market acceptance. In the project "SmartBatt" - funded by the EC under the 7th Framework Programme - a 20 kWh battery pack was developed which exhibits a 10-15% weight reduction as compared to the State of the Art. Besides an improved integration of the battery pack into the body-in-white a new sandwich material concept for the battery housing was used to accomplish this. Core of the innovative sandwich technology is to place polymer-coated aluminium foam granules between pre-moulded aluminium face sheets. Dedicated subsequent foaming of the polymer will result in a sandwich structure whose core layer consists of aluminium foam spheres embedded in a matrix of polymer foam. This approach allows excellent process control and the production of components with targeted local sandwich design. The mechanical properties of AlSi10-Epoxy hybrid foams were determined using quasi-static and dynamic compression tests and compared to the behaviour of epoxy-mono-foams.