Numerical investigation of battery thermal management systems with nanoparticle addition in electric vehicles

Electric vehicles are dynamic research area attracting scientists from all over the world and encouraging them to explore on the contrary internal combustion engines which have almost completed their evolution and have numerous investigations on them. Every work done has an important contribution to the literature of on electric vehicles since it is a new working area. Electric vehicles need batteries to store electricity which is the basic energy source of them. Batteries are one of the main factors that affect the performance of electric vehicles with regard to their electric storage capacity, charge/discharge rate and speed, area covered by their volume and weight. Especially at high discharge ratios, the phenomenon of thermal runaway occurs that leads to the constant continuation of the electrochemical and exothermic reactions in the battery caused by excessive and irregular temperature increase in the lithium-ion batteries. In this case, the burning of the battery or the explosion may be inevitable due to the effect of increasing temperature. When the vehicle has accident, in case of breaking the layer between the anode and the cathode in the battery, thermal runaway occurs, as well. Although the main objective seems to increase the performance of the vehicle, battery thermal management systems are also required for cooling the batteries in electric vehicles in order to increase safety, which is the most important issue in vehicle design. In view of the heating problems seen in battery systems of electric vehicles, the main purpose of this thesis is to model battery thermal management system numerically which has a cooling system that will accelerate the thermal runaway caused by exothermic chemical reactions in the lithium-ion batteries which are used in electric vehicles and directly affect the performance. Thus, it is aimed is to provide an alternative battery thermal management system to the literature.