Coupling simulation of the cooling air duct and the battery pack in battery energy storage systems

Abstract

The air-cooled battery thermal management system (BTMS) is a safe and cost-effective system to control the operating temperature of battery energy storage systems (BESSs) within a desirable range. Different from the design of the air supply flow field of most BESSs in previous studies, this study proposes a novel combined the cooling air duct and the battery pack calculation method to enhance the heat dissipation of the battery. Using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models, potential problems with numerical calculations of cooling air duct and battery packs alone and coupled simulations of the two are investigated. The important factor influencing the uniformity of air supply is identified, and creative measures for improvement are proposed. The results in this paper indicate that the uniformity of the outlet air supply does not indicate that the temperature uniformity performance of the matrix battery meets the requirements due to the variation of the sub air duct outlet pressure, and the coupling simulation of the cooling air duct and the battery pack is an essential process for BESSs. With the improvements proposed in this paper, the standard deviation coefficient of velocity is reduced from 60.3% to 12.6%. Furthermore, the innovative improvement of placing the partition at the connecting duct can regulates the battery temperature between 298.58 K and 311.73 K and ensures a maximum temperature difference of only 4.22 K for a single battery. Ultimately, the power consumption of the cooling system can be reduced by 6.9%. The results of the paper provide a guide for uniform heat dissipation in BESSs.