Numerical Investigation on Various Layouts of Phase Change Materials Based Battery Module Used in Electric Vehicles

The future of automobile industry is moving towards the electrification of vehicles due to the increase in pollution and Global-Warming. In this contest a suitable Battery Thermal Management system (BTMS) needs to be incorporated for efficient operation of batteries. The battery performance is greatly affected by operating temperature, and the successful control of its temperature improves performance which ensures the safe operation and extends lifespan. In the recent years many researches are going on to adopt phase change materials for BTMS. Since the Phase Change material is of the passive cooling system, it does not require any additional power source for its operation. The Current study is an attempt towards the optimization of the battery using PCM by varying the shape and cell spacing for paraffin based PCM Material. In the present work Computational analysis is carried out to analyse the thermal performance of various shapes of battery module. Computational analysis is performed for various layout of batteries like rectangular, Polar and hexagonal layouts. Final test results show that battery module with 8* 3 rectangular layout shows better performance after running 6 hours had maximum temperature rise of 55.9 °C. Regarding other layouts maximum temperature rise of around 67.1°C,63.3°C and 57.6°C is obtained for polar, hexagonal and 6*4 rectangular layout respectively.