Thermal Propagation Modelling of Abnormal Heat Generation in Various Battery Cell Locations

Abstract

With the increasing demand for energy capacity and power density in battery systems, the thermal safety of lithium-ion batteries has become a major challenge for the upcoming decade. The heat transfer during the battery thermal runaway provides insight into thermal propagation. A better understanding of the heat exchange process improves a safer design and enhances battery thermal management performance. This work proposes a three-dimensional thermal model for the battery pack simulation by applying an in-house model to study the internal battery thermal propagation effect under the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation framework. The simulation results were validated with the experimental data. The detailed temperature distribution and heat transfer behaviour were simulated and analyzed. The thermal behaviour and cooling performance were compared by changing the abnormal heat generation locations inside the battery pack. The results indicated that various abnormal heat locations disperse heat to the surrounding coolant and other cells. According to the current battery pack setups, the maximum temperature of Row 2 cases can be increased by 2.93%, and the temperature difference was also increased. Overall, a new analytical approach has been demonstrated to investigate several stipulating battery thermal propagation scenarios for enhancing battery thermal performances.

Keywords

• lithium-ion batteries
• CFD modelling
• air cooling
• heat transfer
• thermal management