A metric based battery thermal design approach

The rapid advancements in Lithium-ion cell design and chemistry demands a quicker adaptation in battery design for optimal use of cell. Thermal design of a battery pack is one of the critical and time-consuming topics during development, as the designer needs to perform multiple tasks - select the thermal concepts, perform simulations, and evaluate them against the requirements within the given boundary conditions. Therefore, transforming the requirements and cell thermal characteristics into inherent thermal design metrics will help the design engineer to objectively approach the design problem and simplify the evaluation process. The metric-based approach is effective in choosing a thermal concept and help evaluate the extent to which each of the requirements are met and achieve trade-offs. An equivalent thermal conductance can be a suitable design metric to derive from the thermal requirements of a battery. The metric-based approach will accelerate the design process and can be used to objectively track effectiveness of future thermal design iterations.