Abstract
Global automobile manufacturers are developing electric vehicles (EVs) to eliminate the pollutant emissions from internal combustion vehicles and to minimize fossil fuel consumptions for the future generations. However, EVs have a disadvantage of shorter traveling distance than that of conventional vehicles. To answer this shortfall, more batteries are installed in the EV to satisfy the consumer expectation for the driving range. However, as the energy capacity of the battery mounted in the EV increases, the amount of heat generated by each cell also increases. Naturally, a better battery thermal management system (BTMS) is required to control the temperature of the cells efficiently because the appropriate thermal environment of the cells greatly affects the power output from the battery pack. Typically, the BTMS is divided into an active and a passive system depending on the energy usage of the thermal management system. Heat exchange materials usually include gas and liquid, semiconductor devices and phase change material (PCM). In this study, an application of PCM for a BTMS was investigated to maintain an optimal battery operating temperature range by utilizing characteristics of a PCM, which can accumulate large amounts of latent heat. The system was modeled using Dymola from Dassault Systems, a multi-physics simulation tool. In order to compare the relative performance, the BTMS with the PCM and without the PCM were modeled and the same battery charge/discharge scenarios were simulated. Number of analysis were conducted to compare the battery cooling performance between the model with the aluminum case and PCM and the model with the aluminum case only.
