Thermal characterization and modeling of an energy storage system

Abstract

The thesis reports a virtual design tool that was developed to predict and analyze thermal loads in an electric vehicle charging system. The tool was designed using computational fluid dynamics techniques and validated with experiments to provide a system-level view of the temperature profiles of all components and airflow patterns inside the charging system. The existing configuration of the charging system indicated that the cooling was capable of maintaining a maximum surface temperature of 35.61℃ for the lithium-ion batteries. Using the virtual design tool, the placement of the air conditioner and configuration of the battery fans were modified, resulting in an improvement in the cooling distribution of the batteries where the maximum surface temperature was decreased to 34.99℃. A novel method of quantifying battery surface temperatures through the use of a Rack Cooling Index was presented for examining the cooling effectiveness in the system.