A great number of performances of an electric vehicle such as driving range,
powering performance, and the like are affected by its configured batteries.
Having a good grasp of the electrical and thermal behavior of the battery before
the detailed design stage is indispensable.
This paper introduces an experiment characterization method of a lithium-ion
battery with a coolant system from cell level to pack level in different ambient
conditions. Corresponding cell and pack simulation models established in AMESim
that aimed to capture the electrical and thermal features of the battery were
also illustrated, respectively.
First, the capacity test and hybrid pulse power characterization (HPPC) test were
conducted in a thermotank to acquire basic data about the battery cell. Next,
based on acquired data, first-order equivalent circuit model (1C-ECM) was built
for the battery cell and further combined with environmental boundary conditions
to check the simulation accuracy. Then, hybrid battery pack tests that encompass
different combinations of ambient temperature, coolant flow rate, coolant
temperature, and charge/discharge rates were conducted in the climate chamber.
Finally, a battery pack model along with a cooling system was built to examine
the correlation between hybrid test data and simulation results.
In capacity and HPPC tests, the voltage drop and temperature change of the
simulated cell model are in good consistency with experiment data. When it comes
to hybrid battery pack tests, though the boundary conditions are more complex,
simulation accuracy presented by the model still shows good acceptance. Hence,
the proposed experiment characterization and corresponding modeling methods
could well describe the electrical and thermal behavior of real batteries, and
it could be expected to be helpful in further studying the energy consumption of
fully electric vehicles associated with the battery.