Prediction of Air Cooling System for EV/HEV Battery Pack*

An efficient cooling system will ensure the reliability of the EV/HEV (Electric Vehicle/Hybrid Electric Vehicle) battery system and extend their lifetime. In order to shorten design period or increase design iterations, a high-speed and high-precision prediction method for cooling is indispensable. For models, such as Mitsubishi i-MiEV, which use fresh air to cool batteries in the battery pack, a transient approach based on loosely coupled method is developed to predict temperature change of batteries. The results by our new approach are in good agreement with the experimental data. Moreover, for the EV/HEV using circulated air to cool its batteries, a second approach is also developed, which can predict the temperature variations of both EV/HEV batteries in the battery pack and the cooling air.