Experiment Investigation and Analysis on Battery with PCM for Electrical Vehicle BTMS

The thermal management system is necessary in electric vehicles (EVs) especially in lithium batteries due to high heat dissipation rate that effects batteries. To improve the heat transfer rate of phase change material in lithium polymer pouch battery, the battery thermal management system by using different phase change materials such as RT15, RT31, and EG5 &EG26 was designed and experimentally investigated in this paper. The systematic investigation on thermo-physical properties of the used PCMs on the performance of the system was conducted. The thermal performance of the system such as temperature reduction and distribution is discussed in detail. The results showed that the temperature on the battery surface is increased to 37.6°C upon different discharge rates without PCM. By incorporating EG26 on the battery surface the temperature difference is observed as 30. 1°C. Slow temperature rise rate and uniform temperature distribution is observed. In addition, numerical research with the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, FLUENT also carried out. The numerical results are in good agreement with experiment data. The experiment and simulation results demonstrated that expanded graphite phase change material coupled battery thermal management system presents an excellent cooling performance.