Investigation of Cooling Performance of Hybrid Battery Thermal Management System Using Nanoparticle-Enhanced Composite PCM and Nanofluid-Charged Pulsating Heat Pipe for Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming a popular choice for consumers. Battery thermal management system (BTMS) is an active research area as battery overheating leads to lower battery life and fire hazards. In this work, a hybrid BTMS is proposed using a composite PCM (Paraffin 1 wt.% Fe3O4 nanoparticle) and a nanofluid (2 wt.% CuO + Fe3O4-water)-charged pulsating heat pipe. An experimental investigation is conducted to investigate the performance of this hybrid BTMS. A module of six substitute batteries is considered as a heat source, which generates equivalent heat generated by 18,650 lithium-ion battery cells operating at a 3C discharge rate. The findings indicate that when utilizing natural convection cooling at the PHP condenser, the PCM reduces 28.21 °C in cell surface temperature. On the other hand, when employing forced convection cooling, the reduction is 16.43 °C compared to baseline results without the hybrid BTMS.