Thermal management is crucial in many engineering applications because it affects the electrical, material, and other properties of the system. A recent study focuses on the use of heat pipes for battery thermal management in electric vehicles, which explores a new area for heat pipe applications. The battery, as one and only energy source in an EV, establishes a vital barrier for automotive industry because it can make the car more expensive and less reliable. The modelling methodology developed in this thesis is a one-dimensional electrochemical model, decoupled and coupled with a three-dimensional flow and heat transfer model. A prototype for 2-cell prismatic battery cooling and preheating using heat pipes is developed, and a full experimental characterisation has been performed. The experimental results characterised system thermal performance as well as validating material properties/parameters for simulation inputs. Two surrogate cells filled with atonal 324 were used in this experiment. The eligibility of substituting atonal 324 for lithium-ion battery electrolytes has been assessed and confirmed. The consistency demonstrated between the finite element analysis and the experiment facilitates BTM simulation at pack level, which is a scale-up model containing 30 lithium-ion batteries. The study shows that heat pipes can be very beneficial to reduce thermal stress on batteries leading to thermally homogenous packs. Additionally, an attempt of integrating biomimetic wicks for ultra-thin flat plate heat pipes is made in response to space limitations in microelectronics cooling. To date, no one has devised an ultra-thin FPHP with enough vapour space by constructing different wicks for each heat pipe segment, especially under anti-gravity condition. It is thus interesting to see whether a new type of wick structure can be made to achieve an optimum heat transfer potential.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:666968 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Wang, Qian |
| Publisher | University of Nottingham |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29358/ |
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