BATTERY THERMAL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM USING ORGANIC PHASE CHANGE MATERIAL RT-35 ENHANCED WITH METALLIC HEAT SINKS

Abstract

The current study aims at investing the impact of phase change material if used in battery thermal management system with an objective of preventing them from deformation, damage or thermal runaway. CFD simulations have been performed for investigating the impact of PCM RT-35 simply mounted around the lithium-ion battery vs PCM RT-35 along with the aluminum metallic inserts in the form of fins. The output results suggest that metallic inserts along with the PCM perform uniform melting as compared to the PCM alone. In this way, the thermal management system consisting of the PCM along with the metallic inserts performed efficiently and the time for the PCM melt was reduced leading to reduction in the overall temperature of the system. All the tasks of the simulations including geometry, meshing, solution setup and post processing are done in ANSYS Fluent. The mathematical model has been solved using FVM which is built-in in ANSYS Workbench.