Modeling of Fluid-Structure Interaction to Enhance Battery Thermal Management in Electric Vehicles

Abstract

AbstractLithium battery can be considered as a high-power density energy storage device in hybrid electric vehicles. The battery’s safety, driving range and functionality are sensitive to the working temperature. Therefore, electric vehicles need complicated battery thermal management components to satisfy the performance requirement of lithium battery. Furthermore, the lithium battery capacity for mild hybrid electric vehicles is much smaller than full electric vehicles, so the air-cooling system can be considered the best choice for mild hybrid electric vehicles. Among different types of cooling performance, the other strength for an air cooling system is that it also can decrease the cost of developing a heat dissipation system in hybrid electric vehicles. At the same time, thermal diffusion around the battery cell can be considered as an obstacle for improving the convective heat transfer rate. In this study, a novel and self-agitated device that takes advantage of vortex-induced vibration is developed to disrupt the thermal boundary layer around the battery cell and enhance thermal performance. An arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian algorithm is developed to simulate fluid-structure interaction field to calculate the heat transfer coefficient. An air-cooling system of the battery pack is developed by using Simcenter AMESim. The AMESim model aims to verify the heat transfer coefficient calculated from the fluid-structure interaction cases, and then investigate the maximum temperature distribution. Our results demonstrate that the vortex-induced vibration by the self-agitated device can increase the heat transfer coefficient up to 46.66% compared with the traditional battery pack. The fluid-structure interaction algorithm can be used to enhance battery thermal management.KeywordsBattery thermal managementHeat transfer enhancementVortex-induced vibrationFluid-structure interactionThermal boundary layer