A novel petal-type battery thermal management system with dual phase change materials

Abstract

Phase change material (PCM) cooling is a prominent approach for battery thermal management. However, its application scenario is severely limited by the narrow range of phase change temperature. When the temperature of PCM does not reach the phase change temperature range, it is either a pure thermal conductive material or a completely molten liquid material, neither of which can play a role in battery thermal management. The present study proposes a novel petal-type battery thermal management system (BTMS) with dual PCMs, which has significantly enhanced the environmental adaptability of the battery based on PCM cooling. The thermal performance of the BTMS at different ambient temperatures and discharge rates is investigated by numerical simulation methods. The results show that when the battery is discharged at 1∼5C at an ambient temperature of 25°C, the maximum battery temperature (Tmax) is 29.87°C, 32.89°C, 34.69°C, 36.84°C, and 39.41°C, respectively. When the battery is discharged at 2C at 20°C, 30°C and 40°C, the Tmax is 30.49°C, 34.16°C and 43.70°C, respectively. Compared with the other two conventional BTMSs using a single type of PCM, the thermal performance and environmental adaptability of the proposed BTMS is the best under the three typical ambient temperatures. Furthermore, the above BTMS is optimized using fin-reinforced heat transfer technology in this paper. Compared to the BTMS without fins, the optimized solution 2 with asymmetric fin arrangement reduces the maximum temperature difference (ΔTmax) by 5.53% and 29.19% and the maximum temperature rise (ΔTmrise) by 36.15% and 42.76% at ambient temperatures of 30°C and 40°C.