Effectiveness analysis of novel battery thermal management systems combining phase change material and air-cooled technologies

A novel hybrid battery thermal management system (BTMS) combining phase change material with air cooling is proposed for enhance heat transfer at the backwind surface of the battery and improve temperature uniformity in traditional air-cooled BTMS. The phase change material (PCM) in the novel BTMS 1 is arranged on the leeside of the battery in a semi-elliptical shape. It is compared with an air-cooled BTMS (BTMS 2) and a hybrid BTMS with PCM uniformly wrapped around the batteries (BTMS 3). When discharging at a rate of 5C, while the air enters at an inlet velocity of 2 m/s, BTMS 1 ' s maximum temperature (Tmax) is 18.3 % lower than BTMS 2 and 8.6 % lower than BTMS 3. Furthermore, the reduction in the maximum temperature difference (Delta Tmax) is 49.9 % when compared to BTMS 2 and 2.9 % when compared to BTMS 3. In addition, the analysis focuses on the thermal performance of BTMS 1 for varying battery spacing ratios and different battery arrangements. Results show that the semi-elliptical arrangement of PCM in BTMS 1 improves heat transfer on the leeside of the battery through effective latent heat absorption, resulting in better thermal management performance. This indicates that BTMS 1 offers considerable promise for battery thermal management applications.