Consideration of graphene material in PCM with aluminum fin structure for improving the battery cooling performance

Abstract

Phase change material (PCM) based battery thermal management system (BTMS) provides even heat distribution and lower maximum temperature, but it suffers from low thermal conductivity. In this study, the impact of graphene additive on PCM was analyzed by presenting three experiments with various structures to solve PCM's low thermal conductivity problem. The results demonstrate that there is no positive impact of graphene additive in the first and third structures. The PCM-graphene additive between the second structure's fins significantly improves the battery heat transfer by allowing the battery to cool down 1500 seconds earlier than the graphene-free structure. Moreover, a thermal equivalent circuit model was derived for the second structure because of its enhanced performance. It is shown that the model works accurately and proves its ability to control not only temperature fluctuations but also transient behavior of the battery. This model provides that the battery temperature can be analyzed without experimentation for different charge-discharge scenarios in lithium-ion batteries with a shorter computation time.