Development of a cooling system for marine power batteries

Abstract

For green shipping, lithium-ion battery-powered ships are rapidly developing. Compared with power batteries for electric vehicles, the large volume and capacity of cells in electric ships make it difficult to dissipate heat, thus requiring efficient cooling. Herein, a novel shape-stabilized phase change material (SSPCM) channel/thermoelectric cooler (TEC) cooling system for marine power batteries was proposed and experimentally studied. It uses TEC for localized cooling and seawater flowing inside the SSPCM as coolant. First, the arrangement of the TECs was experimentally determined. Then, the cooling performance of the system was verified by comparative experiments. The results show that, compared to the cooling system without TECs, the maximum temperature difference was reduced by 28.8 %, with the maximum temperature and temperature difference of 49.8 °C and 3.7 °C, respectively. Compared with the single cooling method, the maximum temperature and temperature difference were reduced by 15.5 % and 53.3 %, respectively. Finally, the experiments were conducted to explore the impact of various parameters on the cooling performance of the system. The unique combination of SSPCM channel, seawater, and TEC provides a new strategy for efficiently cooling marine power batteries at high charge/discharge rates.