Performance simulation of L-shaped heat pipe and air coupled cooling process for ternary lithium battery module

Abstract

Currently, the conventional heat pipe form and working fluid are not well suited for power batteries. Existing simulation studies on battery thermal management with coupled heat pipes often overlook the two-phase flow and heat transfer of working fluid within the heat pipe. Additionally, the temperature difference between electrode region and cell is neglected in thermal behaviour simulation of the battery. Aiming at these problems, this paper proposes the design of an L-shaped heat pipe, which aims to efficiently adapt to heat dissipation of square batteries and the spatial arrangement within the battery module. And the phase change, flow and heat transfer processes of working fluid inside heat pipe are simulated and reproduced using the VOF (volume of fluid) method. Additionally, a CFD (computational fluid dynamics) model of an 8S1P ternary lithium-ion battery module is established based on the NTGK (Newman, Tiedemann, Gu, and Kim) method. Focusing upon thermal behaviour properties of the 8S1P battery module at different discharge rates, we investigate and optimize the thermal management efficiency of L-shaped heat pipes coupled with air cooling. The analysis reveals that the battery module model provides a more accurate representation of the temperature field on the body of batteries and the temperature variation among them. The evaporation-condensation process of the working fluid inside the heat pipe can continue in dynamic equilibrium, and the heat transfer effect through phase transition is well. With battery discharge rates varying from 1C to 3.5C, the addition of forced air cooling and introduction of cold air from air conditioning allows efficient control of temperature and temperature difference of the module, resulting in an ideal cooling effect. This study further improves the accuracy of the design and simulation of BTM (battery thermal management) that coupled with heat pipes, which can provide certain reference for related research.

Keywords

• Battery thermal management
• L-shaped heat pipe
• coupled cooling
• two-phase flow and heat transfer