Effective cooling solutions for fast charge/discharge of Li-ion battery system using metallic phase change material

As the demand of super-fast battery charging technology increases, the key challenge of stored energy and high heat generation in on-board lithium-ion batteries (LiBs) in electric vehicles (EVs) necessitates effective battery thermal management scheme (BTMS). This study presents a numerical analysis of a BTMS using Gallium (Ga) as a metallic PCM integrated aluminum plates. The presented BTMS aims to overcome the challenge of excessive heat generation during fast charge/discharge of LiBs by considering various design parameters, such as height of the aluminum plates (h_al), air inlet and outlet positioning, and environmental conditions. In contrast to a conventional PCM-based BTMS, the Ga PCM-based system decreases the maximum temperature (T_max) by 15.0 K. Increasing h_al by 171.4 % decreases the total mass density of the entire module by 10.2 % and portrays better standard deviation (SD) of temperature distributions. Positioning the airflow inlet at the top side of the module yields effective cooling performance. Moreover, despite a higher discharge rate of 10C, the proposed BTMS successfully regulates the T_max around 313 K, significantly beneath the acute operating threshold temperature for LiBs. This demonstrates significant potential for use in ultra-fast charging and discharging battery applications.