A New Concept of Air Cooling and Heat Pipe for Electric Vehicles in Fast Discharging

This paper presents the concept of a hybrid thermal management system (TMS) including natural convection, heat pipe, and air cooling assisted heat pipe (ACAH) for electric vehicles. Experimental and numerical tests are described to predict the thermal behavior of a lithium titanate oxide (LTO) battery cell in a fast discharging process (8C rate). Specifications of different cooling techniques are deliberated and compared. The mathematical models are solved by COMSOL Multiphysics® (Stockholm, Sweden), the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The simulation results are validated against experimental data with an acceptable error range. The results specify that the maximum cell temperatures for the cooling systems of natural convection, heat pipe, and ACAH reach 56, 46.3, and 38.3 °C, respectively. We found that the maximum cell temperature experiences a 17.3% and 31% reduction with the heat pipe and ACAH, respectively, compared with natural convection.