An Enhanced Electro-Thermal Model for EV Battery Packs Considering Current Distribution in Parallel Branches

Large battery packs are used in electric vehicles. Heat is generated when the battery pack is being used. Therefore, it is necessary to predict battery heat generation. An enhanced electro-thermal model is developed to describe the temperature distribution inside a battery pack. It combines the dynamic resistance model and the current distribution model. The resistance model is affected by the thermal and electrical parameters, while the current distribution model considers the interaction between cell status and current variation in the parallel branch. The proposed model can accurately predict the temperature change of cells in the pack under static and dynamic current conditions. Experiments are conducted to validate the prediction accuracy. Most of the average absolute errors (AE
_ave
) between the predicted value and test value displayed on the experimental device do not exceed 0.4 °C under static current conditions, and all of them are below 0.1 °C under dynamic current conditions. The two existing models, namely the state-of-charge (SOC)-dependent resistance model [R(SOC)] and SOC-T-dependent resistance model [R(SOC, T)], have AE
_ave
values of 1.6 and 0.54 °C when the pack is discharged at 0.5 C. In contrast, the AE
_ave
value achieved by our proposed model is 0.4 °C. Under dynamic current conditions, the maximum AE
_ave
s
are 0.42 °C for the R(SOC) model, 0.26 °C for the R(SOC, T) model, and 0.16 °C for the proposed model. These results demonstrate that the proposed model provides more accurate predictions of the temperature rise inside the pack than the popular existing models.