Greco, Angelo and Jiang, Xi (2016) Numerical and analytical modelling of battery thermal management using passive cooling systems. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
This thesis presents the battery thermal management systems (BTMS) modelling of Li-ions batteries and investigates the design and modelling of different passive cooling management solutions from single battery to module level. A simplified one-dimensional transient computational model of a prismatic lithium-ion battery cell is developed using thermal circuit approach in conjunction with the thermal model of the heat pipe. The proposed model is compared to an analytical solution based on variable separation as well as three-dimensional (3D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The three approaches, i.e. the 1D computational model, analytical solution, and 3D CFD simulations, yielded nearly identical results for the thermal behaviours. Therefore the 1D model is considered to be sufficient to predict the temperature distribution of lithium-ion battery thermal management using heat pipes. Moreover, a maximum temperature of 27.6ºC was predicted for the design of the heat pipe setup in a distributed configuration, while a maximum temperature of 51.5ºC was predicted when forced convection was applied to the same configuration. The higher surface contact of the heat pipes allows a better cooling management compared to forced convection cooling. Accordingly, heat pipes can be used to achieve effective thermal management of a battery pack with confined surface areas. In addition, the thermal management of a cylindrical battery cell by a phase change material (PCM) / compressed expanded natural graphite (CENG) is investigated. The transient thermal behaviour of both the battery and the PCM/CENG is described with a simplified onedimensional model taking into account the physical and phase change properties of the PCM/CENG composite. The 1D analytical/computational model predicted nearly identical results to the three-dimensional simulation results for various cooling strategies. Therefore, the 1D model is sufficient to describe the transient behaviour of the battery cooled by a PCM/CENG composite. Moreover, the maximum temperature reached by the PCM/CENG cooling strategy is much lower than that by the forced convection in the same configuration. In the test case studied, the PCM showed superior transient characteristics to forced convection cooling. The PCM cooling is able to maintain a lower maximum temperature during the melting process and to extend the transient time for temperature rise. Furthermore, the graphite-matrix bulk density is identified as an important parameter for optimising the PCM/CENG cooling strategy. Finally, the lithium-ion battery cooling using a passive cooling material (PCM) / compressed expanded natural graphite (CENG) composite is investigated for the battery module scale. An electrochemistry model (average model) is coupled to the thermal model, with the addition of a one-dimensional model for the solution and solid diffusion using the nodal network method. The analysis of the temperature distribution of the battery module scale has shown that a twodimensional model is sufficient to describe the transient temperature rise. In consequence, a two-dimensional cell-centred finite volume code for unstructured meshes is developed with additions of the electrochemistry and the phase change. This two-dimensional thermal model is used for investigating a new and usual battery module configurations cooled by PCM/CENG at different discharge rates. The comparison of both configurations with a constant source term and heat generation based on the electrochemistry model, showed the superiority of the new design. In this study, comparisons between the predictions from different analytical and computational tools as well as open-source packages were carried out, and close agreements have been observed.