As part of AEC involvement on the road to zero-emission, a new thermal management system was developed in collaboration with Ricardo plc. Results have just been published in Applied Thermal Engineering (IF 4.475) in a paper entitled “Novel battery thermal management system for electric vehicles with a loop heat pipe and graphite sheet inserts” by Marco Bernagozzi, Anastasios Georgoulas, Nicolas Miché, Prof Marco Marengo from the AEC and Dr. Cedric Rouaud from Ricardo plc.

In this work, the feasibility of this new design involving the use of Loop Heat Pipes and graphite sheets have been studied both numerically and experimentally. Loop Heat Pipes are a passive two-phase technology of aerospace origin, which allow extremely efficient heat transfer without the need of consuming additional power to function. This of course is really appealing for EV, where all the available power should be dedicated to move the car. Graphite has been used because of its singular anisotropic thermal properties, as it has high values of thermal conductivity on one plane and very low values on its normal plane, in order to isolate each cell from the other in case of ill behavior by a single cell.

Results showed that this design can outperform a standard cooling system with a liquid cold plate by further reducing the maximum temperature during fast charge by 3.6ºC. Further developments will be focused in investigation on different fluids, and trying to finalize a design for a battery module.

A special thanks to Thercon-LHP for the support.