Thermal Management of Densely-packed EV Battery With Forced Air Cooling Strategies

The modern development of electric vehicle requires higher power density to be packed into a battery pack. It is always expected that the battery can be arranged as much as possible, however, which leads to the serious thermal management issue due to the heat generation inside the battery packs. As extreme temperature affects performance, reliability, safety and lifespan of batteries, thermal management of battery system is critical to the success of all electric vehicles. The objective of this study is to explore the air cooling capability on the temperature uniformity and hotspots mitigation of a compact battery pack subject to various air flow paths, airflow rates. The numerical results show that the improvement of effective heat transfer areas between air-coolant and battery surfaces is able to obviously lower the maximum temperature and improve the maximum temperature difference in the densely-packed battery box. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.