Shape-stabilized phase change material with internal coolant channel coupled with phase change emulsion for power battery thermal management

With the rapid development of new energy vehicles, fast charging and fast discharging are gradually popularized, which puts forward higher requirements for power battery thermal management. In this paper, a novel power battery thermal management system with emulsion as coolant and shape-stabilized phase change material (SSPCM) as its channel is designed and heat transfer performance was experimentally studied. The cooling performance of water, emulsion and graphene oxide emulsion (GO emulsion) were compared. The results show that GO emulsion with high thermal conductivity not only shows better temperature uniformity than water, but also exhibits maximum temperature control ability than pure emulsion. Furthermore, to verify the heat storage effect of SSPCM, thermal performance of the novel system is compared with metal (aluminium) channel system. The SSPCM cooling system can greatly improve temperature uniformity compared with metal cooling system at high charge-discharge rate. Based on the above comparative analysis, the SSPCM cooling system with GO emulsion cooling presents optimal cooling performance of batteries. Finally, to reduce pump consumption, the cooling strategies of different start-up times for GO emulsion are studied. The results show that compared with continuous cooling, starting GO emulsion cooling when the maximum temperature of power battery reaches 42 celcius can improve latent heat utilization of emulsion and reduce the power consumption with few temperature rise (0.2 celcius).