Battery Thermal Engineer

Summary

Do you have a passion for invention and self-challenge? Do you thrive on pushing the limits of what’s considered feasible? As part of our Battery Engineering group, you’ll help craft creative battery solutions that deliver more energy in smaller spaces than ever before. You’ll work across disciplines to transform improved hardware elements into a single, integrated design. Join us, and you’ll help us innovate new battery technologies that continually outperform the previous iterations. By collaborating with other product development groups across Apple, you’ll push the industry boundaries of what batteries can do and improve the product experience for our customers across the world. The Battery Product Development team at Apple produces high energy and highly reliable embedded battery systems for all product teams. Tightly integrated with Product Development, Operations, Industrial Design and Reliability Testing groups, the Battery Product Development team owns battery module development from initial system architecture through ramp.

Description

As a member of the Battery Modeling team, you will be responsible for Thermal performance modeling of battery systems for all Apple products. You will be closely integrated with the Battery Module, Product teams, Battery Modeling and Cell Engineering from the early design stages, analyzing and informing the design of cutting-edge products. You will also work with cross-functional teams within Apple to provide design guidance in terms of thermal impact of the product features and improving overall thermal performance through design changes and mitigations.

Responsibilities

• Develop of state of art Thermal, CFD as well as multi-physics finite element (FE) models of cell, pack, and BMS sub-systems.
• Provide deign and trade-off guidance to the PD teams through early stage simulations, particularly in cases such as fast charging and high power functions.
• Generate models/capability to convert power map into thermal outputs.
• Perform advanced ThermalCAE simulations to evaluate and enhance understanding of the various boundary conditions at the cell, pack, BMS sub-systems around battery packs well as in system.
• Use best in class tools and solvers to generate the necessary simulation models and results.
• Work with test and reliability labs, to develop physical test methods, to gather necessary data for results validation.
• Work with system teams, to collaborate on developing detailed sub-models to be used in assembly level simulations.
• Develop optimized workflows and/or reusable templates for regularly required thermal simulations.
• Work with CAE vendors to drive the functionality improvements to better serve the CAE needs of the group.
• Actively participate in new technology exploration, including application of AI/ML in the physics based simulations.
• Contribute to the development of simulation driven design workflows.

Minimum Qualifications

• MS degree.
• Experience in thermal/CFD engineering simulations.
• Experience with Ansys electronics desktop (AEDT) - IcePak.
• Experience coding in Python.

Preferred Qualifications

• PhD and 10+ years relevant industry experience.
• Experience in transient thermal simulations of assemblies built using MCAD/ECAD inputs.
• Experience in electronic heating and cooling and CFD.
• Experience in AI/ML (surrogate modeling, digital twin).
• Experience with NX, Comsol, Cadence/Allegro.
• Experience in electronics layout design.
• Experience in defining and leading technical development roadmap.
• Experience in a technical lead role and/or managing engineering teams.