Control-Oriented 2D Thermal Modelling of Cylindrical Battery Cells for Optimal Tab and Surface Cooling

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Minimising cell thermal gradients and the average temperature rise requires an optimal combination of tab and surface cooling methods to leverage their unique advantages. This work presents a computationally efficient two-dimensional (2D) thermal model for cylindrical lithium-ion battery cells that is developed based on the Chebyshev Spectral-Galerkin method and allows the independent control of tab and surface cooling channels for effective thermal performance optimisa- tion. This obtained model is validated against a high-fidelity finite element model under the worldwide harmonised light vehicle test procedure (WLTP). Results show that the reduced-order model with as few as two states can predict the spatially resolved temperature distribution throughout the cell and that in aggressive cooling scenarios, a model order of nine states can improve accuracy by about 84%. It is also shown that even though cooling all sides of the cylindrical cell achieves the lowest average temperature rise, cooling only the top and bottom sides provides minimum radial thermal gradients.