Study on a Battery Thermal Management System Based on a Thermoelectric Effect

As is known to all, a battery pack is significantly important for electric vehicles. However, its performance is easily affected by temperature. In order to address this problem, an enhanced battery thermal management system is proposed, which includes two parts: a modified cooling structure and a control unit. In this paper, more attention has been paid to the structure part. According to the heat generation mechanism of a battery and a thermoelectric chip, a simplified heat generation model for a single cell and a special cooling model were created in ANSYS 17.0. The effects of inlet velocity on the performance of different heat exchanger structures were studied. The results show that the U loop structure is more reasonable and the flow field distribution is the most uniform at the inlet velocity of 1.0 m/s. Then, on the basis of the above heat exchanger and the liquid flow velocity, the cooling effect of the improved battery temperature adjustment structure and the traditional liquid temperature regulating structure were analyzed. It can be seen that the liquid cooling structure combined with thermoelectric cooling demonstrates a better performance. With respect to the control system, the corresponding hardware and software were also developed. In general, the design process for this enhanced battery thermal management system can provide a wealth of guidelines for solving similar problems. The H commutation circuit, matrix switch circuit, temperature measurement circuit, and wireless communication modules were designed in the control system and the temperature control strategy was also developed.