Optimized air-cooling thermal management system for high power lithium-ion capacitors

Air cooling technologies are of great significance for ensuring the robustness of lithium-ion capacitor (LiC) batteries due to its simple structure and high cooling performance. However, the air cooling system is encountering structure optimization challenges because of some variable factors. In this paper, a simple but effective air-cooling system is proposed to overcome the high generated heat issues in high power applications. Hence, a LiC battery with a two-side fan has been studied to investigate the cooling performance of the proposed thermal management system (TMS). In one side, the fan blows the air and on the other side, the other fan sucks the air. In the optimization part, the impact of the inlet-outlet of the system and inlet air velocity are studied to optimize the active cooling structure. The results indicate that the most significant factor is the inlet velocity, which has the most influence on the cooling performance. Results demonstrate that without cooling system, the temperature of the LiC cell goes beyond 55 °C, which reduces the lifespan of the battery. After adding the active air-cooling system to the cell, the temperature is controlled at 37 °C, which shows the performance of the proposed optimized cooling system. Besides, by utilizing the optimization method, the maximum battery temperature and the temperature uniformity of the LiC cell are reduced by 25%.