Developments in battery thermal management systems for electric vehicles: A technical review

In this era of a sustainable energy revolution, energy storage in batteries has come up as one of the most emerging fields. Today, the battery usage is outracing in e-vehicles. With the increase in the usage of batteries, efficient energy storage, and retrieval in the batteries has come to the foreground. Further, along with a few other parameters, the operating temperature of the battery of an electric vehicle plays a vital role in its performance. Also, the internal heat generation limits the performance of the lithium-ion batteries. The operating temperature range of an electric vehicle lithium-ion battery ranges from 15 degrees C to 35 degrees C and this is being achieved by a battery thermal management system (BTMS). Owing to the efficiency of these systems, a considerable amount of work has been performed beforehand. To take this research forward, this paper gives a comprehensive review of all the experimental and numerical analyses conducted on various BTMS techniques for electric and hybrid vehicles where the battery cooling systems with air, liquid, phase change material, heat pipe, refrigeration cooling methods are discussed. The significant findings and outcomes of the experimental, simulation, and modeling work on BTMS in recent past years are reviewed in depth. Besides that, a systematic review of hybrid battery cooling systems is also presented in this paper. Lastly, a summary is made of all the developed BTMS along with their experimental, mathematical, and computational simulation models.