INFLUENCE OF COOLING METHODS ON THE ENERGY DENSITY OF BATTERIES : Comparing different cooling methods for Lithium-ion batteries

Abstract: Due to climate change, the energy system needs to change from traditional fossil fuels to be dominated by renewable energy sources. Not only the energy system, but the increasing number of vehicles and emissions from the transport sector are a problem for climate change and that need to be solved. Both can be solved with batteries, to handle climate change issue. The lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) have a high energy density which is important due to the less needed materials for the batteries. LIBs can be used in a battery energy storage system (BESS) to store the excess energy for later usage, and as an electric vehicle (EV) battery. For these high energy density batteries, there comes drawbacks such as safety issues by deviating temperatures which have effects on the capacity, lifetime, performance, and in worst case a thermal runaway can occur which may lead to fire and explosions. These temperature issues can be solved with a battery thermal management system (BTMS), which can manage temperature deviation. Cylindrical battery cells with the dimension 18650 with the cell chemistry Lithium-Nickel-Cobalt-Aluminum-Oxide (NCA) will be investigated with different discharge rates, how the heat generation increases, and how it can be handled by cooling systems. A battery pack will be built up in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software called Ansys Fluent, to be simulated and see how the influence of cooling methods affect the energy density of the 18650 batteries. Air-cooling and liquid-cooling with fan as air-cooling and plate cooling as liquid cooling will be used in this work. 20 cells were investigated with air and liquid cooling, with two different cases with air-cooling. 100 cells with just liquid cooling during 0,5C was investigated on how the number of cells impacted on the energy density. It was seen that the different discharge rates (C-rate) had an impact on the amount of cooling, with air cooling being not as good as liquid cooling for cooling the battery pack and more flow was needed. The energy density in relation to weight showed that 20 cells with less spacing using air-cooling had the best energy density at 196,68 Wh/kg. It was also seen that the number of cells had an impact on the energy density in relation to volume. With the best energy density with 100 cells using liquid cooling at 279,96 Wh/L.