Tesla Filed a Patent for a Hydraulic Coupling Device for Its Structural Battery Pack's Cooling Systems

Image: Tesla patent

Tesla filed a patent for a hydraulic coupling device. The company is looking to improve cooling systems for its structural battery packs with 4680 battery cells.

Tesla has patented an invention that relates to coupling devices. More specifically, it refers to hydraulic coupling devices for cooling systems, including automotive cooling systems. The company applied for a “Hydraulic coupling device” on April 19, 2022, and the patent was published on October 27, 2022. More specifically, the invention will be used in Tesla's structural battery pack, which uses 4680 battery cells.

Tesla explains in the patent that “hoses manufactured from traditional plastic and rubber materials are typically used for sealing interfaces. However, typical low-durometer (i.e. hardness) hoses have poor axial stiffness and typical high-durometer hoses require high installation forces, making them ill-suited for straightforward assembly. Furthermore, many typical hoses require hose clamps in order to create reliable seals over their lifetimes and/or suffer from poor robustness to geometric variation and mechanical damage or debris at the sealing interfaces. As such, it may be desirable to produce a coupling device that may easily be installed and create reliable seals in varying environments.”

FIG. 6 is a photograph of coupling devices 602 atached barbs 604 connected to cooling distributers 606 of a batery cooling system 600

Earlier, Elon Musk said that the overall architecture of Tesla's structural battery pack is right from a physics standpoint, but it still needs to be optimized. The improvement of each part of the structural battery pack will eventually lead to the most optimized battery pack that will provide all the advantages inherent in the design that was in mind. Tesla is currently on track to achieve this and ramping up production of 4680 battery cells and vehicles using structural battery packs will help the company improve sooner.

Structural pack is the right overall architecture from a physics standpoint, but it is still far from optimized

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2022

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