Thermal management of cylindrical power battery module for extending the life of new energy electric vehicles

Thermal management especially cooling plays an important role in power battery modules for electric vehicles. In order to comprehensively understand the heat transfer characteristics of air cooling system, the air cooling numerical simulation battery models for cylindrical lithium-ion power battery pack were established in this paper, and a detailed parametric investigation was undertaken to study effects of different ventilation types and velocities, gap spacing between neighbor batteries, temperatures of environment and entrance air, amount of single row cells and battery diameter on the thermal management performance of battery pack. The results showed that the local temperature difference increased firstly and then decreased with the increase of wind speed. Reversing the air flow direction between adjacent rows is not necessarily appropriate and the gap spacing should not be too small and too large. It is prone to thermal runaway when the ambient temperature is too high, and the most suitable value of S/D (the ratio of spacing distance between neighbor cells and cell diameter) is gradually reduced along with the increase of cell diameter.