Reducing lithium-ion battery thermal runaway risk based on an integrated cooling strategy for electric vehicles

Nowadays, thermal runaway of lithium-ion battery is widely considered to be a serious hazard to the safety of electric vehicles. In order to effectively prevent thermal runaway, an integrated thermal management solution is proposed. Firstly, a few models of battery, air conditioning system, phase change cooling and liquid cooling are established, respectively. The temperature and heat are used to coupling each model. Then the effectiveness of models is validated by experiment. Finally, the cooling performances of this system are discussed. Under the circumstance of thermal runaway, the battery thermal management system can inhibit thermal runaway, and the battery temperature is reduced from 1208.17 to 304.82 K. In addition, the influences of the convective heat transfer coefficient and flow channel number on the cooling effect are also studied, and in order to ensure that the batteries have an appropriate temperature and reduce energy consumption, their values should be 20 W∙m −2 ∙K −1 and 5, respectively. When the vehicle is normally driving, the influences of different driving speeds, pump speeds and compressor speeds on the battery temperature are discussed, meanwhile, combined with the cooling effect of air conditioning, a reasonable and economic scheme is determined, that is, the pump speed is 2250 r∙min −1 and the compressor speed is 2500 r∙min −1, and under this scheme, the maximum battery temperature is only 35 °C, and the cab temperature can be reduced to the target temperature within 112 s.