Electric delivery trucks need battery packs that can survive long highway runs, but manufacturing steps such as laser welding can shorten battery life if done poorly. A recently completed European project, LaserBATMAN, tackled this by building multiscale simulation into battery-pack design. The project ran from May 2022 to May 2025 and involved Volvo Group Trucks Operations, the Technical University of Denmark, Resolvent, and other industry and research partners.
Resolvent, a Denmark-based engineering consultancy, built the models in COMSOL Multiphysics. The team started with an electrochemical model of a single battery cell, trained a deep neural network on its outputs, and expanded the reduced-order model to the whole pack. The resulting custom app lets Volvo's R&D group adjust pack geometry, cell count, ambient temperature, and charge-discharge cycles, then view predicted weld temperature, state of charge, and solid-electrolyte interface thickness.
The app also includes a "tool within a tool" for busbar weld design. Users can vary weld shape, busbar thickness, and laser penetration depth to see how production variability might affect performance. The source article is a sponsored project profile, so it presents only the developers' account and offers no independent validation or comparison with other simulation approaches.