Electric vehicles (EVs) are currently emerging as alternative vehicles due to their high energy efficiency and low emissions during driving. However, regarding the raising concern, the safety of EVs can further be improved before they completely replace conventional vehicles. This paper focuses on reviewing the safety requirements of EVs, especially those powered by Li-ion battery, based on the mechanical abuse tests from the international standards, national standards, regulations and other laboratories standards, and safety of occupants from the regulations and safety programs. Moreover, the publicly reported real-world fire incidents of EVs based on road crashes were collected and reviewed. The objective is to highlight the gap and challenges arose between the current safety requirements and real-world fire incidents of EVs and provide the way for assisting the future research in the area of EV safety, particularly light duty passenger vehicle. The serious challenges observed include high impact speed, multi-crashes per incident, multiple barriers of different types involved in the accident, and post-crash safety (serious injury and demise) of occupants and rescue teams. While addressing these challenges, this review will aid researchers and manufacturers working in batteries, EVs, and fire safety engineering to narrow the gap and enhance the safety of future EVs in areas of battery materials, fire extinguishing, and vehicle’s body structure.

Computer simulation plays a key role in chemical process design. Currently, there are a large number of widely accepted commercial software. For example, Aspen Plus which was used to simulate offshore petroleum production processes, but it is often too costly to purchase and maintain a valid software license. On the other hand, since open-source software is freely accessible, the simulation models developed using open-source software could be studied, reviewed, and modified by any interested parties. This would help promoting technology transfer and knowledge dissemination in both academic and industry sectors. We specifically focus on the simulation of chemical process using the modeling software to evaluate thermal and chemical behaviour of the system which uses the chemical processes related to offshore petroleum production facilities as an example to demonstrate the software capabilities of both Aspen Plus and DWSIM. This work emphasizes on the comparison of simulation results calculated by commercial software namely Aspen Plus vs. open-source software called DWSIM (An open-source sequential modular steady state simulator) [1]. The simulation was carried out under the steady-state conditions, adiabatic processes, and negligible pressure losses. Finally, simulation results from DWSIM and Aspen Plus were compared with the heat and mass flow diagram which was used as reference. It was found that the discrepancy between simulation and reported values was in general less than 5%. It has been demonstrated that free and open-source software like DWSIM could potentially perform similar tasks as commercial software.