Electrification in the automotive industry started a long time ago, but the dire need and pressure for the manufacturers to have hybrid or fully electrified platform in their fleet started just less than a decade ago. Most of the major OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) though seemed to struggle in the beginning, were able to catch-up relatively fast to this electrification change. China has become one of the strongest players in the electrified automotive sector. These rapid advancements on one hand, are beneficial to our society such as providing cleaner transportation, bringing the carbon footprint in the automotive sector down. But on the other hand, several other risks or concerns are yet to be addressed such as LIB (Lithium-Ion Batteries) catching fire, explosions etc., as the electrified powertrains are not as mature as ICE.

Several governmental bodies such as the European Commission -EU, United Nations, NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), ISO and IEC are constantly updating their regulations based on technological advancements which governs EVs (Electrified vehicles) and ESS (Energy Storage Systems) for high voltage applications. When it comes to LIBs, abuse testing is an important part of development and verification process to make sure that the REESS is safe to be released to end consumers. Another such important environment abuse test is the accelerated salt-spray test, which shows an ESS’s capacity to withstand salt exposure in elevated and varying temperatures and relative humidity and resist towards corrosion. This research work is done to verify a battery pack (device under test) developed by Polestar Performance AB®. The experiment was performed as per the standards laid out in IEC 60068-2-52; ISO 9227:2022; GB 38031-2020; and ECE R100. This report is drafted at the half-time or 20 test cycles (40 in total), so corrosion analysis is performed only on the external part of the DUT. Test set-up, preparation, instrumentation for data acquisition, control set-up for heating and ventilation unit have been described in detail. Then an in-depth analysis using DewesoftX™ is performed to study about the behavior of the DUT and the different critical parameters such as temperature, hydrogen concentration, isolation resistance, relative humidity are addressed as well. For the fasteners which displayed corrosive reaction after 20 test cycles, a corrosion analysis was performed, and the type of corrosion and its possible causes were also described in detail. Finally, the hazard categorization of the DUT as per EUCAR’s hazard classification  showed that this battery pack is within level 0-1.