Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Analysis via CFD of the battery interconnection pipeline circuit to the electric bus thermal management system
Submission Author:
André Okamoto , SP
Co-Authors:
André Okamoto, Danilo Albuquerque Ribeiro, Leandro Salviano, ALUISIO PANTALEAO
Presenter: André Okamoto
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0494
Abstract
The use of numerical methods for predicting phenomena associated with a flow plays an important role in the development of new technologies and improvement of previously existing technologies in the area of Fluid Mechanics. In this way, the study of calculation methodology based on modern CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) corresponds to a great step towards the understanding of phenomena physics related to the flow, and can be used in a series of applications, such as ship hydrodynamics, aircraft aerodynamics, biomedical engineering, among others. The purpose of this work is to design an optimized duct circuit that interconnects the batteries to the thermal management system of an electric public urban transport vehicle (BEV – Battery Electric Buses), using free codes (open source software), and contribute to increasing the vehicle’s autonomy. One of the most important features of this cooling system is suitability for the operating climate, as that a change of 0.4 ◦C in the system can cause considerable loss of autonomy. For this study, different types of proposed insulator were simulated individually subject to a constant heat flux from external environment, with the possibility of multilayer if necessary. Using the OpenFOAM software, steady-state numerical simulations involving heat transfer were performed for the different types of insulation in order to obtain the maximum thermal efficiency. Numerical results obtained using the RAS k-ω SST turbulent model were expected to be close to the flow topology reported by experimental literature. It is proposed, then, to validate the numerical techniques developed here from databases of data from vehicle tests, specifically applied to the pipelines of the thermal management of the battery pack. The results allowed to determine the optimal cooling system among series of insulation, that provides the best thermal efficiency, contributing to autonomy of the vehicle. In addition, the robust and customized metodology employed allows extrapolation to other thermal vehicle systems.
Keywords
CFD, OpenFOAM, interconnection ducts, Thermal management, suitability to the operating climate
