An intelligent thermal management system for optimized lithium-ion battery pack

Battery thermal management system is one of the most essential parts for the battery pack in electric vehicles. In this paper, a new battery thermal management system is developed through the combination of the battery pack structure optimization and the cooling strategy design. First, a new battery pack equipped with the hollow spoiler prisms based on the aligned battery pack is designed to improve the cooling performance. The best intervals design between cells and the optimal sizes of spoiler prisms are given. Second, the reciprocating air flow is applied to improve the temperature uniformity of the cells, and an indicator is put forward to determine the suitable reciprocation period of air flow. Third, the intelligent cooling method based on fuzzy model predictive control is adopted to adjust the cooling intensity according to heat dissipation needs and energy consumption. Finally, the ANSYS simulation results show that the proposed battery thermal management system can save 76.4% of energy compared to the conventional cooling system, while maintaining the average temperature of cells around the optimal operating temperature. And the temperature non-uniformity is reduced from 1.5 °C to around 0.6 °C.