Liquid Leak Tightness Standards for EVBattery Packs
Recommended Practice
J3277/1
This Recommended Practice proposes test practices to evaluate the Water Leak Tightness of Propulsion Battery Packs that emulates the equivalent results of IEC 60529 to an IPX7 level applying the Selected Equivalent Channel (EC) per SAE J3277 and provide guidelines for proper tooling design, validation, and leak test procedure. This practice is in consideration of the design limitation of some battery packs while utilizing applicable common air or tracer gas leak tightness technologies.
Rationale: Vehicles using high voltage systems for electrified propulsion are expected to be introduced to market in increasing quantities. These vehicles include, but are not limited to, plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). Battery packs in these vehicles might be mounted in locations that are exposed to water, either through rain/snow weather conditions or relatively low levels of standing water. Users of these vehicles are anticipated to have some amount of assurance that such water exposure will be unlikely to result in water leakage into a battery pack. Common (and regulatory) functional test requirement for water ingress is per IPX7 standard, which is a destructive test and is not applicable for an in-line production testing.
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The suggested practices can be used for application of the selected Equivalent Channel (EC) per SAE J3277/1 for mass production or lab non-destructive tests of battery packs as a surrogate for water intrusion testing.
