Method to characterize thermal performances of an aluminum-air battery

Abstract

The thermal behavior in aluminum-air battery has prominent effect on its operation performance, however, the investigations to the battery thermal behavior are still scarce. In this paper, an alkaline vehicular traction aluminum-air battery was designed and its thermal behavior was experimentally investigated. The impacts of various parameters were examined, including the ambient temperature, electrolyte concentration, and discharge current density on the battery's temperature-rise, outgoing heat-flux, heat generation rate, and discharge efficiency, etc. It is shown that the battery's temperature-rise, outgoing heat-flux, and heat generation rate increase with the ambient temperature decreases and the electrolyte concentration increases. Furthermore, the battery heat generation rate decreases over the discharge time, particularly it decreases drastically at the first half of discharge. The discharge efficiency of the battery increases with the increases of operating temperature and discharge current density. The battery discharge efficiency varies with the electrolyte concentration, which approaches 78 % under the electrolyte concentration of 3.0 mol L⁻¹, but less than 60 % under the concentrations of 1.0 mol L⁻¹ and 6.0 mol L⁻¹. The present study compensates a vacancy of the thermal behavior characterization for a vehicular traction aluminum-air battery, and the results are of significance in understanding the aluminum-air battery's thermal behavior.