Due to the reduction in pollutant emissions, the number of electric vehicles has experienced rapid growth in worldwide traffic. Vehicles equipped with batteries represent a greater danger of explosion and fire in the case of traffic accidents, which is why new protective systems and devices have been designed to improve impact safety. Through their design and construction, auxetic structures can ensure the efficient dissipation of impact energy, reducing the risk of battery damage and maintaining the safety of vehicle occupants. In this paper, we analyze the crashworthiness performance of a battery case equipped with an energy absorber with a particular shape based on a re-entrant auxetic model. Simulations were performed at a velocity of 10 m/s and applied to the battery case with a rigid impact pole, a configuration justified by most accidents occurring at a low velocity. The results highlight that by using auxetic structures in the construction of the battery case, the impact can be mitigated by the improved energy absorber placed around the battery case, which leads to a decrease in the number of damaged cells by up to 35.2%. In addition, the mass of the improved energy absorbers is lower than that of the base structure.

The reduction of pollutant emissions in the field of transportation can be achieved by developing and implementing electric propulsion technologies across a wider range of transportation types. This solution is seen as the only one that can offer, in areas of urban agglomeration, a reduction of the emissions caused by the urban transport to zero, as well as an increase in the degree of the health of the citizens. This paper presents an analysis of the direct and indirect environmental aspects of a fleet of real electric buses under service in the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The solution of using 41 electric buses to replace Euro-3 diesel buses (with high pollution levels) in the city’s transport system eliminates a local amount of 668.45 tons of CO₂ and 6.41 tons of NO_x—pollutant emissions directly associated with harmful effects on human health—annually.

The exponential development and successful application of systems-related technologies that can put electric vehicles on a level playing field in direct competition with vehicles powered by internal combustion engines mean that the foreseeable future of the automobile (at least) will be dominated by vehicles that have electric current stored in batteries as a source of energy. The problem at the European level related to the dependence on battery suppliers from Asia directly correlates with the need to use batteries as energy storage media for energy from renewable sources (photovoltaic and wind), and leads to the need for research into the possibilities for their reuse, remanufacturing or recycling (at the end of their life or purpose of use), and reintroduction, either fully or partially, back into the economy. This article presents possibilities for increasing the protection of the integrity of the cells that form a battery in the event of an impact/road accident, by the numerical analysis of a topographically optimized battery module case. The proposed solution/method is innovative and offers a cell protection efficiency of between 16.6–60% (19.7% to 40.7% if the mean values for all three impact velocities are considered). The efficiency of a cell’s protection decreases with the increase in impact velocity and provides the premise for a greater part of the saved cells to be reintegrated into other energy storage systems (photovoltaic and/or wind), avoiding future problems relating to environmental pollution.

The article presents the possibilities of integrating artificial intelligence (through specific machine learning techniques) in the design and construction process of a battery in order to optimize its thermal management. The workflow starts from CFD thermal simulations (1C-rate) of a battery (16 Li-ion cells, type 18650, 4 × 4 arrangement), and based on the results, a complex thermal landscape is created through radial basis function (Rbf) interpolation. Furthermore, a robust neural network (NN) model is proposed and validated through the obtained performances, which is used further for the optimization of the design space (DSO) and multi-objective optimization (MOO) processes. The obtained results show that for DSO, a cell spacing of 1.37 mm is proposed for a maximum cell temperature of 25.53 °C, and in the case of MOO, a cell spacing of 2.64 mm (for minimum fan energy consumption). The main conclusion of the obtained results shows that the use of the NN model as a surrogate (the Digital Twin of a physical model) presents two great advantages in the process of designing a battery: running a CFD simulation for each point on the 2D grid would take hours, while the NN model can generate the entire map and find the optimum in less than 2 s, and moreover, thousands of additional points can be evaluated to find the thin limit of optimal models, effectively filtering out thousands of energy-consuming “suboptimal” configurations.

One of the obstacles to the adoption of electric vehicles as a future pollution-free transport solution is that the energy sources (batteries) have not yet become sustainable through a long-life span under the specific operating conditions. The problem that arises is that high temperatures inside the batteries represent a safety risk and have negative effects on the battery life span, which imposes the use of thermal management systems. The present article aims to analyze, by numerical methods, the effect of the use of a fireproof composite resin on the efficiency of the thermal management system, specifically on the degree of battery sustainability (measured by the effect on the life span). Five constructive variants are proposed and thermally analyzed. Based on the measured temperatures, the intensity of the chemical reactions that occur in a 18650-type Li-ion cell was calculated, and conclusions related to the impact on the life span were drawn. It has been found that the use of a fireproof composite resin leads to an increased heat transmission towards the outer environment and an increase in the life span by 22.2% compared to that noted for conventional air cooling. The results also recommend the use of heat exchangers associated with flame retardant resins, which leads to a 20.6% improvement in the heat transfer capacity of the battery’s thermal management system. When comparing the solutions in which the flame-retardant resin is used, the results show that adding 3 wt.% of nanomaterial leads to a significant life span increase of 11.7% when compared to the results for the resin-only case.

In the current car market, electric vehicles have begun to be accepted more and more by consumers, which has led the conventional vehicles’ manufacturers (and not only) to produce and sale a wider range of such vehicles. However, there is still a huge potential for development in this respect, with every car class still being available to accept new electric vehicle models. In this context, the present paper presents a research on identifying the main technical and performance characteristics of electric vehicles available in the current automotive market and establishing degrees of correlation between them. The strongest statistical correlation has been identified as finding that of the battery's energy capacity and the possible autonomy/range can be achieved for a full battery’s charge.