Cooling Characteristics and Optimization of an Air-Cooled Battery Pack

2025-01-7016

01/31/2025

Features
Event
SAE 2024 Vehicle Powertrain Diversification Technology Forum
Authors Abstract
Content
Lithium-iron phosphate batteries are widely used in energy storage systems and electric vehicle for their favorable safety profiles and high reliability. The designing of an efficient cooling system is an effective means of ensuring normal battery operation, improving cycle life, and preventing thermal runaway. In this paper, we proposed a forced-convection air cooling structure aiming at uniform temperature distribution and reducing the maximum temperature. The initial step was constructing a heating model for a single LiFeO4 battery. A source function was derived from the experimental data, which described the variation in heating power with discharge depth. This function was then used to create a dynamic loading of the battery heating model. Subsequently, a three-dimensional model of a 7-series and 2-parallel battery pack was constructed. Seven schemes were designed on the basis of the traditional Z-shaped structure, with the position of the air inlet and outlet altered. The analysis found that the inlet and outlet positions affect the temperature of the battery pack, and the optimal positional scheme can control the temperature rise at the end of battery discharge within 18.54 K. On this basis, we added some disturbing structures near the high-temperature battery, which reduced the maximum temperature and maximum temperature difference by 4.32 K and 5.45 K, respectively. This proves to be a highly efficient cooling structure, which realizes the improvement of the cooling effect on the basis of not changing the external structure of the battery. In addition to optimizing the structure, we also investigated the effects of six different temperature levels and five different air inlet velocities on the performance of the air-cooling system. The results showed that both lowering the air temperature and increasing the air velocity have a positive effect on the cooling performance.
Meta TagsDetails
DOI
https://doi.org/10.4271/2025-01-7016
Pages
11
Citation
Zhang, J., Liu, T., Dai, H., and Lin, J., "Cooling Characteristics and Optimization of an Air-Cooled Battery Pack," SAE Technical Paper 2025-01-7016, 2025, https://doi.org/10.4271/2025-01-7016.
Additional Details
Publisher
Published
Jan 31
Product Code
2025-01-7016
Content Type
Technical Paper
Language
English