Novel thermal management methods to improve the performance of the Li-ion batteries in high discharge current applications

Over the last few decades investigating the performance of thermal management in the high charge/ discharge current has been taken into consideration in many studies. In this study, a mature heat pipe based air cooling system is built to control the temperature of the lithium-ion (Li-ion) cell/module in the high current (184 A) discharging rate. The temperature of the cell/module experimentally and numerically is considered by the lack of natural convection, natural convection, forced convection, and evaporative cooling. According to the experimental results, the natural and forced convection decrease the average temperature of the cell by 6.2% and 33.7% respectively. Moreover, several numerical simulations are solved by COMSOL Multiphysics (R), the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The simulation results are validated against experimental results at the cell level for natural and forced convection. It indicates that the evaporative cooling method is robust to enhance the current cooling system method for further optimization. The results show that there is a 35.8% and 23.8% reduction in the maximum temperature of the cell and module due to the effect of the evaporative cooling method respectively. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Automated summary

The study investigates the performance of evaporative cooling method in managing high current thermal loads, showing significant reduction in lithium-ion battery temperature and promising reliability for further optimization of cooling systems.