In his presentation, Dr Joachim Floeck, Program Segment Manager, Electric Powertrain, Celanese Europe focused on the system requirements in EV powertrain which is slowly driving expectations towards the application of plastics which is still new to the automotive industry.

He said “Requirements for safety, increased range as well as reducing charging time are the most known challenges besides cost reduction and sustainability which are becoming increasingly important. All these industry imperatives result in various system requirements The recent challenge is to translate the requirements resulting from the imperatives in requirements to our performance in plastics.”

“For example, increased safety can be reached by mitigating thermal propagation in case of a battery cell on fire. As plastics are a part of a battery setup, they need to meet several requirements on frame retardancy but also a more general resistance to thermal treatment” added Dr Floeck.

Dr Floeck has over two decades of experience with Celanese and is a doctorate in Tribology of Unidirectionally carbon fibre re-enforced peak composites.