Purpose This paper aims to present a fully coupled thermo-electrical finite-element battery model with an applied model-order reduction. The model is used to analyse the thermal design of battery modules during typical drive-cycles of electric vehicles. Design/methodology/approach A model-order reduction is applied, in which the electrical linear bus-bars are analysed in an a-priori step. For these bus-bars, special distributed basis-functions are computed, which make the solution of differential Ohm's law unnecessary during the transient simulation. Furthermore, the distributed basis-functions are used to strongly couple the non-linear battery models, which reduces the iterations needed to simulate them. Findings Altogether, this results in a fast simulation scheme for coupled linear and non-linear electrical components and their thermal behaviour. Originality/value The presented method delivers an innovative approach, on how to systematically minimize the computational effort in a system of linear and non-linear electrical components, while keeping the full three-dimensional information of the original problem.

Purpose The Cauer ladder network (CLN) model order reduction (MOR) method is applied to an industrial inductor. This paper aims to to anaylse the influence of different meshes on the CLN method and their parameters. Design/methodology/approach The industrial inductor is simulated with the CLN method for different meshes. Meshes considering skin effect are compared with equidistant meshes. The inductor is also simulated with the eddy current finite element method (ECFEM) for frequencies 1 kHz to 1 MHz. The solution of the CLN method is compared with the ECFEM solutions for the current density in the conductor and the total impedance. Findings The increase of resistance resulting from the skin effect can be modelled with the CLN method, using a uniform mesh with elements much larger than the skin depth. Meshes taking account of the skin depth are only needed if the electromagnetic fields have to be reconstructed. Additionally, the convergence of the impedance is used to define a stopping criterion without the need for a benchmark solution. Originality/value The work shows that the CLN method can generate a network, which is capable of mimicking the increase of resistance usually accompanied by the skin effect without using a mesh that takes the skin depth into account. In addition, the proposed stopping criterion makes it possible to use the CLN method as an a priori MOR technique.