Physics-Based CFD Simulation of Lithium-Ion Battery Under a Real Driving Cycle

Lithium-ion battery has been widely used in electric appliances due to its high energy density. It also has been used in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and electric vehicles (EVs). Battery's performance, life and safety are of great engineering importance. Using the simulation tool, battery's electric performance and thermal behavior can be computed to provide useful information in battery's design and optimization.

The physics-based electrochemical model, Newman's Pseudo-2D (P2D) porous electrode model, has been widely accepted in the study of lithium-ion batteries. However, the model is built on the electrode scale. There are two challenges to apply such models in the electrochemical-thermal coupled battery simulation. The first one is how to use such electrode-scale models in the large scale simulation (battery dimension scale). The other one is how to make the physics-based model cost-efficient in a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. In this work, the multi-scale multi-dimensional approach (MSMD) [1] is used to address the first technical issue, and a linear approximation method for source terms [2] is used to address the second issue. As a result, Newman's P2D model can be used to simulate a lithium-ion battery's behavior under a real driving cycle in a three dimensional CFD simulation. In this work, a single battery cell under the FUDS driving cycle is simulated, and spatial distributions and time histories of many key variables related to the thermal and electrical behavior are presented.

References

1. G-H Kim et al, ``Multi-Domain Modeling of Lithium-Ion Batteries Encompassing Multi-Physics in Varied Length Scales," J. of Electrochem. Soc. 158 (8) A955-A969, 2011.
2. M. Guo and R.E. White, ``A Distributed Thermal Model for a Li-ion Electrode Plate Pair," J. of Power Resources, 221, pp. 334-344, 2013.