Performance assessment of a passive core cooling design for cylindrical lithium-ion batteries

Abstract

Summary Battery thermal management (BTM) system is an indispensable component for large‐sized lithium‐ion battery packs used in aerospace and automotive applications. Besides providing a proper temperature range for batteries to operate, thus improving their efficiency, lifespan, and safety, the BTM system also needs to be well designed with considering the cost, weight, and practicability. In this paper, an internal passive BTM system is proposed for the cylindrical Li‐ion batteries. The design embeds a phase change material (PCM) filled mandrel inside the battery to achieve the cooling effect. A thermal test cell is first fabricated and tested in a wind tunnel under different cooling scenarios, and it is also used to verify a numerical thermal model. The proposed BTM system is further examined through the model and found to be able to create a preferable environment for batteries to operate. Specifically, the core BTM system consumes less PCM and achieves lower temperature rises and more uniform temperature distributions than an external BTM system. The proposed design can also exert its full latent heat to manage the heat generated from the battery without having a thermally conductive matrix, which is usually composite with PCM in external BTM systems. In addition, experiments show that the battery equipped with the proposed BTM system is ready for intensive cycling tests.

Performance of a liquid cooling‐based battery thermal management system with a composite phase change material

“…They found a significant temperature difference of 45°C when comparing CPCM cooling and air convective cooling. Zhao et al embedded a mandrel which contains PCM into a battery unit to provide passive cooling. A developed cell was tested under different scenarios and provided validation to the numerical modelling.…”

Dynamic behavior and modeling of prismatic lithium‐ion battery

“…Thermal and charging safety have been extensively studied in the literature . Cylindrical, prismatic, and pouch LIBs are the main types of LIBs used in EVs.…”

Experimental investigation on the effect of ambient pressure on thermal runaway and fire behaviors of lithium‐ion batteries

“…FM Global carried out the combustion experiments of large capacity LIB pack and found that the combustion behavior of LIB pack was different from a single cell . In addition, numerous efforts have been devoted to design more efficient and advanced battery thermal management (BTM) systems to prevent thermal runaway propagation, including phase change material (PCM) cooling, air cooling, cooling plates, and heat pipe cooling . Fire behaviors under aviation environment is different from normal conditions, which is determined by the environmental pressure.…”