The Effect of Vortex Generators on Active Battery Thermal Management Solutions

Abstract

As a result of increasing oil prices and consumer environmental awareness, “green” products such as electric vehicles (EVs) have grown in popularity, but the energy storage technologies that make such products possible have many hurtles preventing further growth. Drawbacks such as battery safety issues, cycle related cost, and poor low temperature performance, all of which are thermally dependent, slow the growth of the emerging electric and hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) market. There are many improvements that can be made to the battery thermal management systems (BTMS) commonly used in EVs, including, but not limited to, the use of phase change materials and the addition of vortex generators in coolant flow channels. This study examines the effects of vortex generators on the heat transfer performance of typical battery thermal management solutions. Computational fluid dynamics simulation software designed for studying heat transfer problems in lithium-ion batteries was used to determine such effects. The addition of vortex generators to a generalized BTMS has shown an increase in average heat transfer coefficient of 38% and a decrease in average cell wall temperature of 6 Kelvin with a manageable increase in pressure cost.