Experimental investigation on thermal performance of battery thermal management system with heat pipe assisted hybrid fin structure under fast charging conditions

Abstract

Heat pipe cooling has been verified to be a promising solution in battery thermal management due to its fast heat transfer characteristics; however, it has the limitation of a large space requirement. In this regard, the current study presents novel heat pipe-assisted hybrid fin structures for a battery thermal management system (BTMS) and experimentally investigates their thermal performance under fast charging conditions with 3.0 C current rates. A battery module comprising four battery cells was built for the cooling target. Two novel BTMSs with heat pipe-assisted hybrid fin structures were designed; for the comparative analysis, the general plain fin structure was adopted as the baseline BTMS. In view of the maximum temperature, and temperature deviations, their thermal performances were closely investigated under different coolant flow rates and inlet temperatures, and better thermal performance of the proposed BTMS using a heat pipe is demonstrated. Representatively, the proposed BTMS can maintain the maximum battery temperature below 45 °C. Particularly, it is superior in maintaining the temperature deviation within the battery module, as both the inner and inter-cell temperature deviations can be maintained below 4.8 °C under any operating conditions. Moreover, the proposed BTMSs reduce the total thermal resistance from 13.7 to 28.0 %.