Temperature Distribution Optimization of an Air-Cooling Lithium-Ion Battery Pack in Electric Vehicles Based on the Response Surface Method

Abstract

Electric vehicles have become a trend in recent years, and the lithium-ion battery pack provides them with high power and energy. The battery thermal system with air cooling was always used to prevent the high temperature of the battery pack to avoid cycle life reduction and safety issues of lithium-ion batteries. This work employed an easily applied optimization method to design a more efficient battery pack with lower temperature and more uniform temperature distribution. The proposed method consisted of four steps: the air-cooling system design, computational fluid dynamics code setups, selection of surrogate models, and optimization of the battery pack. The investigated battery pack contained eight prismatic cells, and the cells were discharged under normal driving conditions. It was shown that the optimized design performs a lower maximum temperature of 2.7 K reduction and a smaller temperature standard deviation of 0.3 K reduction than the original design. This methodology can also be implemented in industries where the battery pack contains more battery cells.