Performance assessment of a new hydrogen cooled prismatic battery pack arrangement for hydrogen hybrid electric vehicles

This paper proposes a new novel battery cooling system for hydrogen fueled HEVs that achieves more efficient cooling and driving, which increases vehicle driving range and enhances vehicle safety by maintaining the batteries at optimum operating conditions. The proposed system offers a novel use of the vehicle fuel and a novel cooling plate design. The cooling plate design is optimized in terms of battery's temperature uniformity and battery's maximum temperature. The optimum performance of the design is then investigated through a 600 s high intensity discharging and charging cycle of 4C. The results show that when hydrogen is at a temperature of 10 °C and has an inlet velocity of 0.01 m/s, the maximum temperature is maintained at lower than 30.5 °C. The lowest difference through the battery obtained by the proposed system is less than 7 °C. The performance of the proposed system is compared with the performance of liquid, air and evaporative cooling based systems. The comparison shows that the proposed system is able to perform better than liquid, air and evaporative cooling based cooling systems. The performance of the proposed cooling system demonstrates the advantage of integrating the hybrid vehicle fuel system with the battery cooling system.