Abstract
The air-cooling battery thermal management system has been widely adopted as the thermal management device for power accumulators on electric vehicles nowadays. To improve the system heat transfer coefficient with the minimum rise in cost, this study modified conventional rectangular cell arrangements for 21,700 cylindrical cell battery packs with two approaches: 1. increase the vertical spacings; 2. convert constant vertical spacings to gradient vertical spacings. The results show that smaller vertical spacings are beneficial to the overall cooling performances of the constant vertical spacings designs at almost all flow rates. The gradient vertical spacing design with larger spacing could deliver better temperature uniformity, while the one with smaller spacings could suppress the maximum temperature more efficiently at higher flow rates. However, the total battery pack volume of Design 7 (the largest gradient vertical spacing design) is 7.5% larger than the conventional design.
Highlights
Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) have been widely adopted as the onboard power battery cell type for commercial electric vehicles (EV) [1,2]
This study focuses on the effects of the cell spacing optimization on the cooling performances of air-cooling battery thermal management system (BTMS) with 21,700 cylindrical LIB cells, which still lacks research in the literature
The GVSG designs with smaller spacings (40/30/24 mm and 42/31.5/25.2 mm) delivered lower Tmin values at five flow rates, flow rates, which could insinuate poor temperature uniformity performances of 5 which could insinuate the poorthe temperature uniformity performances of Design
Summary
Lithium-ion batteries (LIB) have been widely adopted as the onboard power battery cell type for commercial electric vehicles (EV) [1,2]. Air cooling and liquid cooling are two dominant technical routes for commercial EV BTMS. Liquid-cooling BTMS has higher cooling efficiency and capacity at the cost of its high expense and complex structure. The strong urge for cost reduction has aroused interest in the air-cooling BTMS. To cope with this economical and technical impulse, this study aims to improve the heat transfer efficiency and cooling performance of a basic air-cooling BTMS design. Changing the cooling channels, modifying the inlet and outlet, adopting more thermally conductive materials, adding fins and vortex generators, and cell-cooling methods are all effective to improve overall cooling performances. For the cooling channel improvement, one novel approach is to adjust the LIB cell spacings to form variable cooling channels, obtaining different cooling performances
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