A numerical study of PCM battery thermal management performance enhancement with fin structures

Abstract

Phase change material (PCM) cooling is regarded as a promising thermal management technique to realize a proper battery working temperature. However, the low thermal conductivity of PCM restricts its practical applications. In this study, the impact of aluminum fin insertion on the thermal performance of PCM thermal management is explored. Couples of fin structure shapes were adopted and their performances were compared. It is demonstrated from the simulation results that, among the fin structures investigated in this study, the bifurcated fin structures achieved the lowest battery maximum temperatures, specifically, the battery temperature was reduced by 6.16 K compared to the pure PCM case under 5C discharge (5C means that battery is discharged from full of charge to 0% state of charge in 1/5 h). The 2-branch bifurcated fin structure could realize a further 0.50 K temperature drop than the single-branch counterpart. Besides, the impacts of various parameters were investigated. The maximum temperature at the end of 5C discharge process was reduced from 314.30 K to 311.36 K when the fin quantity increased from 3 to 8. The maximum battery temperature reaches up to 313.80 K if the thermal contact resistance between the battery and fin structure grows to 0.0025 W/(m2⋅ K) with 8 fins while it could be decreased by 1.21 K if the contact resistance reduced half to 0.00125 ((m2⋅ K)/W. The maximum battery temperature was found to decrease by 0.27 K with PCM width enlarged from 28 mm to 29 mm.