Counterflow canopy-to-canopy and U-turn liquid cooling solutions for battery modules in stationary Battery Energy Storage Systems

Abstract

This work documents the liquid cooling solutions of Li-ion battery for stationary Battery Energy Storage Systems. Unlike the batteries used in Electric Vehicles which allow to use liquid cold plates, here the cooling must be implemented at the scale of modules filled with three rows of 14 cells each. Before moving to the scale of the modules, two different numerical cell models are developed and compared. One determines the temperature fields while the heat generated during the cell discharge is calculated simultaneously with the voltage changes. The other model uses the heat generated as input data, leading to similar temperature distributions throughout the cells and to much shorter computational times. At the module level, the two different configurations studied are U-turn cooling, inspired from cooling systems found in certain Electric Vehicles, and counterflow canopy-to-canopy cooling, a solution allowing a better control of the thermal exchanges. It is shown that while the two options are based on the same volume of fluid and lead to similar pressure losses, the counterflow canopy-to-canopy presents the advantage of a better control of the volumetric temperature distribution throughout the entire module.