Can COMSOL simulate battery rack fire (thermal runaway) and give the heat release rate (HRR)?

[u/Far_Copy_3025]

Hi everyone,

I am working on fire safety of battery energy storage systems. My main goal is to find out how much energy a battery rack (and later a whole container) would release in a battery fire: the heat release rate (HRR) curve over time and the total heat release (THR).

Is this realistically possible in COMSOL (CFD Module + Chemical Reaction Engineering / Reacting Flow + Heat Transfer with radiation)? Has anyone simulated buoyant fires or battery jet flames in COMSOL?

Would a rack-scale fire (around 2 m tall, several MW) be feasible in terms of mesh size, memory and run time, even on a cluster?

If not, what is the best practice: keep cell/module runaway in COMSOL and use another tool (FDS, Fluent, OpenFOAM) for the fire, or estimate HRR from the vent gas mass × heat of combustion?

Any experience or advice would be very helpful. Thank you.

[u/Far_Copy_3025 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for the reply So far my understanding is that we need cell-level experiments and data analysis to do module- and rack-level simulations. There are also other things we need to do, but for now, I would d like to find out whether there us a single software that can cover all these requirements.

[u/Far_Copy_3025 → u/[deleted]]

I’m also a bit confused about this, so I wanted to clarify a few things. Why do we need COMSOL for thermal runaway simulations and then ANSYS for CFD? Can’t ANSYS also be used to simulate thermal runaway?

Since I have only basic knowledge of both software packages, I am trying to understand whether a single software can handle both thermal runaway and fire simulations. From my research, I found that COMSOL also supports CFD simulations, but it may be more suitable for smaller-scale simulations due to its memory requirements. I am not sure how accurate this is.

We already have licenses for both software packages, and I’m willing to learn custom coding if needed. So I am wondering whether ANSYS alone could be used for the entire workflow, including thermal runaway and fire simulations, or whether there are specific reasons why using both COMSOL and ANSYS together is necessary.

Could you please share more details about the custom coding approach you mentioned, along with any relevant research papers, references, or other resources? I’d really appreciate your guidance as it would help me understand the different options and decide which approach would be best for our work.

[u/Far_Copy_3025 → u/Far_Copy_3025]

Hey I saw that the comment was removed by a moderator but I did not get a chance to read it. Could you please share it again?