Thermal management of batteries using supercapacitor hybrid architecture with idle period insertion strategy

Abstract

Thermal analysis and management of batteries have been an important research issue for battery-operated systems, such as electric vehicles and mobile devices. Nowadays, battery packs are designed considering heat dissipation, and external cooling devices, such as a cooling fan, are also widely used to enforce the reliability and extend the lifetime of a battery. However, this type of approaches cannot achieve an immediate temperature drop to avoid a thermal emergency situation. Approaches based on removing the heat from the heat sources via idle period insertion (similar to what is done for silicon devices) would allow faster thermal response; however, it is not obvious how to implement these schemes in the context of batteries. In this paper, we propose the use of a simple parallel battery-supercapacitor hybrid architecture with a dual-mode discharge strategy that can provide immediate temperature management, in which the supercapacitor is used as an energy buffer during the idle periods of the battery. Simulation results show that the proposed method can reduce the battery temperature during charge and discharge while exploiting the advantage of the parallel connection. © 1993-2012 IEEE.