Ricerc@Sapienza

Temperature control is one of the most significant factors to improve the performance
and extend the cycle life of a battery. It is, therefore, important to design and implement
an effective battery thermal management system (TMS). Phase change materials (PCMs)
can be used as a cooling means for batteries. In the present paper, a preliminary analysis
of the thermal behavior of PCMs used to cool down a heated metal surface was carried
out. Tests have shown that pure PCMs are able to limit the temperature increase, but
only for relatively low-heat fluxes. At higher values of the heat produced, the thermal
conductivity of the PCM was increased by using solid foams characterized by higher
thermal conductivity; it was, thus, possible to keep the surface temperature within safe
limits for longer times. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the composite
material (PCMþsolid foam) was also developed, which allowed to predict the temperature
trend within the system under different boundary conditions. However, the average
thermal conductivity of the composite system that best fitted the experimental results was
found to be much lower than that theoretically predicted by using common semiempirical
correlations.