Robustness of RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanized Rubber) Joint Design in Electric Vehicles 2022-28-0082

As the automobile industry is moving towards Electrical vehicles, it becomes very important to have low cost and robust solution to seal all the internal Battery sub systems. It’s a known fact that various IC engine Vehicles are already using Room temperature vulcanized rubber (RTV) for many metal and composite sealing interfaces. Nevertheless, it always needs a good structural design to have good sealing performance. For designing a robust RTV joint for composite structures, it becomes important to have standard RTV chamfers. Sometimes even with these standards, it becomes very costly in having warranty issues when we have weak structure around RTV chamfers. Any joint structure involves multiple design parameters which might impact the sealing performance. Some of the joint structural parameters should be well designed at the early phase of product development cycle, which otherwise will later add lot of cost in modifying the product with its integrated components. Hence, the RTV joint design should include the critical understanding, of how the mechanical and thermal load is distributed around the bolts on the seal land area for the composite. Generally, the region at the bolts experiences more load and the region between the bolts observes less load.

This variation in the load distribution with respect to different design parameters, is high for composites as it generally deforms significantly compared to metal. Hence, a specific study is performed to understand the kind of composite joint structure required to accommodate in an electrical vehicle, to efficiently use this low-cost RTV sealing solution.