A linear parameter-varying model for HEV/EV battery thermal modeling

Battery thermal management for high power applications such as electrical/hybrid vehicles is crucial. Modeling is an indispensable tool to help engineers design better battery cooling systems. A fast and accurate battery thermal model capable of predicting volume-averaged cell temperature or temperature at user specified locations under transient heat dissipation and varying mass flow rate is proposed. In such an approach, several state space models are generated first from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) results for different mass flow rates. Then a linear parameter-varying (LPV) model is created out of the state space models to account for non-constant flow rates. The model is then shown to provide excellent results compared with those from CFD under transient heat dissipation and mass flow rate. Such a LPV model runs many orders of magnitude faster than the original CFD model.