Numerical Study of Combined Phase Change Material and Natural Air Cooling System for Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Management

A three-dimensional numerical study is performed to analyze the combined effect of phase change material cooling and natural air cooling on a prismatic lithium-ion battery. The Newman, Tiedemann, Gu, and Kim method under the Multi-Scale Multi-Domain battery model is chosen to predict the actual behavior of a battery during charging. To study the thermal behavior of a 20 Ah cell with a proposed cooling system, a prismatic pouch cell of 192 × 145 × 7 mm3 combined with a 2-mm-thick PCM chamber having the same surface area is built. The performance of a cooling system is tested for different charging rates. In addition, a comparison of the thermal performance of battery with the proposed phase change material cooling system and air cooling is also performed. The result shows that with phase change material cooled system, the cell temperature is maintained below 335 K at high charging rate.