Thermal Behavior of Prismatic Lithium-Ion Battery during Rapid Charge and Discharge Cycles

Abstract

The temperature of secondary batteries may increase above allowable limits and deteriorate its performance, during rapid charge and discharge cycles. Therefore, assessing thermal behavior of battery is essential. On the other hand, rectangular parallelepiped shape batteries are supposedly going to be used more commonly for cars and electrical devices because of their better space efficiency. Then, we constructed a two dimensional Cartesian coordinates battery thermal behavior model for a prismatic lithium-ion secondary battery during rapid charge and discharge cycles. It was extended from one dimensional cylindrical coordinates model, which had been developed and experimentally verified. As parameters of the numerical model, battery heat source factors such as overpotential resistance, entropy change, heat transfer coefficient and heat capacity have been measured. The radiation thermometer was used for obtaining battery surface temperature variance and distributions. Battery temperature generally increases as charge and discharge cycle proceeds, nevertheless temperature drops were observed at begging of low rate charge cycle and vicinity of SOC = 0.8 in discharge cycle. Our modified model could predict these phenomena and agreed well with experimental results. Then the reliability of our numerical model and measuring techniques of heat source factors are confirmed each other. © 2005, The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. All rights reserved.