Minimum Air Cooling Requirements for Different Lithium-ion Battery Operating Statuses

Batteries play an important role in increasing the use of renewable energy sources. Owing to the temperature sensitivity of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), battery thermal management systems (BTMSs) are crucial to ensuring the safe and efficient operation of LIBs. Researchers have mainly focused on evaluating the performance of BTMS; however, little attention has been paid to the minimum cooling requirements of LIBs, which are important for optimizing the design and operation of BTMSs. To bridge this knowledge gap, the aim in this study was to determine the minimum air cooling requirements for different LIBs operating statuses based on computational fluid dynamics simulations. The inlet airflow rate had the strongest influence. For the studied cases, when the battery operates at charge/discharge (C) rate of three or below, the inlet temperature should be set below 35 °C, and the gap between the batteries should be greater than 3 mm to meet the minimum heat dissipation requirement. At a C-rate of 0.5C, natural convection is sufficient to meet the cooling needs, whereas at 1C or higher rates, forced convection is required. Increasing the number of batteries from six to eight has little impact on the inlet flow required to accommodate the battery heat dissipation.