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

Kai Chen, Zeyu Li, Yiming Chen, Shuming Long, Junsheng Hou, Mengxuan Song and Shuangfeng Wang
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Kai Chen: Key Laboratory of Enhanced Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation of the Ministry of Education, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China
Zeyu Li: Key Laboratory of Enhanced Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation of the Ministry of Education, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China
Yiming Chen: Key Laboratory of Enhanced Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation of the Ministry of Education, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China
Shuming Long: Key Laboratory of Enhanced Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation of the Ministry of Education, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China
Junsheng Hou: Key Laboratory of Enhanced Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation of the Ministry of Education, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China
Mengxuan Song: Department of Control Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 201804, China
Shuangfeng Wang: Key Laboratory of Enhanced Heat Transfer and Energy Conservation of the Ministry of Education, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China

Energies, 2017, vol. 10, issue 10, 1-22

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.

Keywords: battery thermal management; air cooling; system parameters; plenum angle; numerical study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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