A novel H-type cooling system with a self-adaptive control strategy for efficient battery thermal management

The air-cooled systems with reciprocating flow can reduce the temperature difference of battery packs. However, the reduced temperature difference using the current strategies is difficult to meet the requirements under the condition with large discharge current of batteries. To address this problem, an H-type air-cooled battery thermal management system with a self-adaptive control strategy is developed. Numerical method was used to assess the cooling performance of the system, and the results were experimentally validated. The H-type system with reciprocating flow was proposed and investigated. The numerical results reveal that shorter switching periods can reduce the temperature difference, but is difficult to control the temperature difference below 1.0 K. Then a self-adaptive control strategy was developed to adjust the flow pattern of the system based on the real-time temperature distribution of the battery pack, which is expected to control the temperature difference of the battery pack below the pre-set value. The mechanism by which the strategy fails was revealed and the widths of the parallel channels were designed to address this issue. Numerical results indicate that the designed system with the proposed strategy controls the temperature difference below 1.0 K under both five-current discharge condition and varying operating conditions. Compared with the system under the control strategy in the previous study, the number of flow pattern switches for the designed system is reduced by 33 %, and the maximum temperature standard deviation of one single battery cell decreases from 2.4 K to 0.9 K. The proposed H-type system with the self-adaptive control strategy shows great potential for efficient battery thermal management.