Thermal performance of phase change material/oscillating heat pipe-based battery thermal management system

• The PCM/OHP coupled cooling system was proposed for power batteries.
• Proper battery terminal direction and OHP placement on BTMS performance were investigated.
• The start-up temperature of OHP was studied.
• The PCM/OHP-based BTM system presented a better cooling performance.

To understand the cooling effect of power battery system within electric vehicle, this paper experimentally studied a phase change material/oscillating heat pipe (PCM/OHP)-based battery thermal management (BTM) system. The influencing factors, including temperature variations under different heating powers, battery surrogate terminal direction and OHP placement, were discussed. In this study, the cooling effects of OHP-cooled and PCM/OHP-based BTM system were also compared. The results showed that: (1) in order to obtain evenly distributed temperature, the start-up temperature of OHP, which was decided by the target temperature and maximum temperature difference (ΔT), should be below the phase change temperature of PCM; (2) the battery surrogate terminals should be away from the adiabatic section of OHP; (3) the PCM/OHP-based BTM system designed in this study was more efficient in cooling than the OHP-cooled system. The results of this experiment may contribute to designing of the PCM/OHP coupled battery cooling system.