Abstract
In electric vehicles, the battery pack is one of the most important components that strongly influence the system performance. The battery thermal management system (BTMS) is critical to remove the heat generated by the battery pack, which guarantees the appropriate working temperature for the battery pack. Air cooling is one of the most commonly-used solutions among various battery thermal management technologies. In this paper, the cooling performance of the parallel air-cooled BTMS is improved through choosing appropriate system parameters. The flow field and the temperature field of the system are calculated using the computational fluid dynamics method. Typical numerical cases are introduced to study the influences of the operation parameters and the structure parameters on the performance of the BTMS. The operation parameters include the discharge rate of the battery pack, the inlet air temperature and the inlet airflow rate. The structure parameters include the cell spacing and the angles of the divergence plenum and the convergence plenum. The results show that the temperature rise and the temperature difference of the batter pack are not affected by the inlet air flow temperature and are increased as the discharge rate increases. Increasing the inlet airflow rate can reduce the maximum temperature, but meanwhile significantly increase the power consumption for driving the airflow. Adopting smaller cell spacing can reduce the temperature and the temperature difference of the battery pack, but it consumes much more power. Designing the angles of the divergence plenum and the convergence plenum is an effective way to improve the performance of the BTMS without occupying more system volume. An optimization strategy is used to obtain the optimal values of the plenum angles. For the numerical cases with fixed power consumption, the maximum temperature and the maximum temperature difference at the end of the five-current discharge process for the optimized BTMS are respectively reduced by 2.1 K and 4.3 K, compared to the original system.
Highlights
In recent years, electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) have attracted worldwide attention due to their cleanness
The result showed that the maximum temperature of the battery pack for the parallel ventilation cooling was reduced by 4 ◦ C, and the temperature difference was reduced by 10 ◦ C compared to the serial ventilation cooling
The cooling performance of the parallel air-cooled battery thermal management system (BTMS) is improved through using appropriate system parameters
Summary
Electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) have attracted worldwide attention due to their cleanness. The study of Liu et al [16] showed that when the inlet airflow rate was increased for a certain value, the influence of the further increase of the flow rate on the cooling performance will be weakened. The result showed that the maximum temperature of the battery pack for the parallel ventilation cooling was reduced by 4 ◦ C, and the temperature difference was reduced by 10 ◦ C compared to the serial ventilation cooling. The influences of different parameters on the performance of the parallel air-cooled BTMS are investigated and compared.
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