Safety Engineering of Electric Vehicle Batteries in Canada (7:30 – 9:30 PM)

November 28, 2019
Suiteworks Business Centre 92 Caplan Avenue Barrie, ON L4N 9J2

Vehicles with hybrid and electric drive trains have become relatively commonplace today. They are made possible though many innovations in power train technology and engineering however, the most important and challenging innovations have been in the energy storage component. If asked most people would agree that the customer wants and needs of the battery system can be reduced to four categories – energy, power, cost and safety. The picture would be complete if we assigned these requirements across the lifespan of the vehicle. Of these, power is the only clear achievement. Cost is being dealt with through conventional engineering practices and materials innovations. Energy content is the focus of many different institutions and is already showing significant improvement over five years ago. Safety, however, is an assumed attribute by most customers but have been some surprises in this area. A handful of hybrid and electric vehicles have been destroyed to some extent by batteries that could not be controlled after an unexpected incident. It is the investigation of the effects of unexpected incidents that are being pursued by companies such as TUV SUD in Newmarket, Ontario. This talk will present how TUV SUD is testing both batteries and vehicles.

Our presenter, Erik J. Spek, P.Eng. is Chief Engineer for TÜV SÜD Canada with technical responsibility for battery and electric vehicle verification services in North America. He received degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Industrial experience includes TÜV SÜD Canada, Managing Director at Aloxsys Inc., Chief Engineer at Magna International, Manager of Engineering and Operations at ABB Advanced Battery Systems and Director of Engineering at Powerplex Technologies.

He was a member of the ABB sodium sulfur battery team that provided 38 kWh battery packs for the Ford Ecostar program. Mr. Spek is a member of SAE since 1980 and a Certified Manufacturing Engineer in the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He has authored and co-authored papers on sodium sulfur battery development and Lithium Ion battery testing and has written articles on battery technologies for Batteries International, Charged and Penton Media. He is an SAE seminar leader on battery technology and safe handling of high voltage batteries and has delivered seminars to the energy storage industry, academia, government and other institutions. He has contributed to conferences on battery product standardization and presented at conferences including AABC (Advanced Automotive Batteries Conference), The Novi Battery Show, SAE New Energy Vehicles Conference (Shanghai), Battery Safety Conference and IEEE PSES. He is leading TUV SUD’s R&D activities to support battery and electric vehicle standards development.