Development and Evaluation of Active Thermal Management System for Lithium-Ion Batteries using Solid-State Thermoelectric Heat Pump and Heat Pipes with Electric Vehicular Applications

Abstract

Lithium-Ion batteries have become a popular choice for use in energy storage systems in electric vehicles (EV) and Hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) because of high power and high energy density. But the use of EV and HEV in all climates demands for a battery thermal management system (BTMS) since temperature effects their performance, cycle life and, safety. Hence the BTMS plays a crucial role in the performance of EV and HEV. In this paper, three thermal management systems are studied: (a) simple aluminum as heat spreader material, (b) heat pipes as heat spreader, and (c) advanced combined solid state thermoelectric heat pump (TE) and heat pipe system; these will be subsequently referred to as Design A, B and C, respectively. A detailed description of the designs and the experimental setup is presented. The experimental procedure is divided into two broad categories: Cooling mode and Warming-up mode. Cooling mode covers the conditions when a BTMS is responsible to cool the battery pack through heat dissipation and Warming-up mode covers the conditions when the BTMS is responsible to warm the battery pack in a low temperature ambient condition, maintaining a safe operating temperature of the battery pack in both modes. The experimental procedure analyzes the thermal management system by evaluating the effect of each variable like heat sink area, battery heat generation rate, cooling air temperature, air flow rate and TE power on parameters like maximum temperature of the battery pack (Tmax), maximum temperature difference (ΔT) and, heat transfer through heat sink/cooling power of TE (Qc). The results show that Design C outperforms Design A and Design B in spite of design issues which reduce its efficiency, but can still be improved to achieve better performance.