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

Paper i 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.