Development of a pipeless, cascade phase change power battery thermal management system

Abstract

To solve the problems of pipe weight and phase change material (PCM) utilization in the PCM coupled liquid cooling system, a novel pipeless cascade shape-stabilized phase change material coupled phase change emulsion (PCE) cascaded with the shape-stabilized PCM BTMs was proposed. Firstly, a pipeless shape-stabilized PCM channel with high thermal conductivity was prepared. Compared with pure PCM, its thermal conductivity was increased by about 45 times, and it had excellent leakage prevention ability. Then the cooling performance of the shape-stabilized PCM channel BTMs was compared to the metal channel BTMs, and the cooling performance of the PCE/shape-stabilized PCM channel BTMs was compared to the performance of the water/shape-stabilized PCM channel BTMs. It turns out that the shape-stabilized PCM channel coupled PCE BTMs have both good temperature control performance and excellent temperature uniformity. And the thermal management performance of pipeless cascaded shape-stabilized PCM and the cascade between shape-stabilized PCM and PCE in BTMs was studied. Compared with BTMs without cascade phase change, the maximum temperature and maximum temperature difference are reduced by 1.7 °C and 0.5 °C, respectively. What's more, compared to the PCE cascaded with the shape-stabilized PCM, the cascaded shape-stabilized PCM channel has a greater influence on the performance of the BTMs. Finally, compared with other existing BTMs, this work has strong competitiveness in reducing the maximum temperature and the maximum temperature difference of the battery module.