Design of Parallel Air-Cooled Battery Thermal Management System through Numerical Study

Abstract

Abstract:In electric vehicles, the battery pack is one of the most important components that strongly influence the system performance. The battery thermal management system (BTMS) is critical to remove the heat generated by the battery pack, which guarantees the appropriate working temperature for the battery pack. Air cooling is one of the most commonly-used solutions among various battery thermal management technologies. In this paper, the cooling performance of the parallel air-cooled BTMS is improved through choosing appropriate system parameters. The flow field and the temperature field of the system are calculated using the computational fluid dynamics method. Typical numerical cases are introduced to study the influences of the operation parameters and the structure parameters on the performance of the BTMS. The operation parameters include the discharge rate of the battery pack, the inlet air temperature and the inlet airflow rate. The structure parameters include the cell spacing and the angles of the divergence plenum and the convergence plenum. The results show that the temperature rise and the temperature difference of the batter pack are not affected by the inlet air flow temperature and are increased as the discharge rate increases. Increasing the inlet airflow rate can reduce the maximum temperature, but meanwhile significantly increase the power consumption for driving the airflow. Adopting smaller cell spacing can reduce the temperature and the temperature difference of the battery pack, but it consumes much more power. Designing the angles of the divergence plenum and the convergence plenum is an effective way to improve the performance of the BTMS without occupying more system volume. An optimization strategy is used to obtain the optimal values of the plenum angles. For the numerical cases with fixed power consumption, the maximum temperature and the maximum temperature difference at the end of the five-current discharge process for the optimized BTMS are respectively reduced by 2.1 K and 4.3 K, compared to the original system.

Applications and thermal management of rechargeable batteries for industrial applications

“…However, as demonstrated by Lee [101], a fan can be employed to blow air to the battery packs of a hybrid electric vehicle and thermally cool down the cells to the optimum operating temperature. In another study, conducted by Chen et al [102], air flow was forced through a set of lithium-ion battery cells which were placed in a specially designed duct and by increasing the air velocity, the temperature of the battery pack was reduced. Using active forced air cooling is investigated to be a relatively simple and low-cost arrangement for thermal management of batteries [101], however it is investigated that the low and limiting heat transfer rate offered by the system make this method ineffective when dealing with high thermal applications as in high power batteries.…”

Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Based Optimization of an Air Jet Impingement System

“…There are a number of reasons that make this importance evident, and that have been pointed out by Lasance [1]: First, at the component level, the designers cause an increase in the power density as a result of the reduction of the packaging, therefore, the reduction of the thermal resistance between the heat sources and the casing is especially important. One of the first fields in which this need took place was in aeronautics [2], especially at the military level, but with the introduction of the electric mobility and the need to use it inside the limited space at the powerful direct current in direct current (DC-DC) converters [3] and batteries with high discharge rates [4], thermal management is reaching workaday objects. In addition, according to the international roadmap for devices and systems [5], the forthcoming introduction of semiconductor architectures in 2.5D and 3D, which seeks to approximate to the ideal transistor concept, will be one of the greatest short-term challenges of the semiconductor industry because of the difficulty of extracting heat from the die stack.…”

An integrated framework for minimization of inter lithium‐ion cell temperature differences and the total volume of the cell of battery pack for electric vehicles

“…9 For example, the air cooling system (ACS) is widely used in EV because it not only can reduce the weight and cost of the battery pack, but also easy to maintain. 10 While according to the research of Kim et al, 11 the cooling effects of ACS is lower due to the low heat capacity of air. In addition, the disadvantages of ACS include higher energy consumption, the limited utilization space, and noise problem.…”

“…The traditional TMS have both advantages and disadvantages . For example, the air cooling system (ACS) is widely used in EV because it not only can reduce the weight and cost of the battery pack, but also easy to maintain . While according to the research of Kim et al, the cooling effects of ACS is lower due to the low heat capacity of air.…”