Thermal management performance improvement of phase change material for autonomous underwater vehicles' battery module by optimizing fin design based on quantitative evaluation method

Efficient thermal management of lithium battery modules has become a thorny problem in the development of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), especially under high current discharge. In this article, the fin/phase change material (PCM) composite structure was proposed for AUV's battery thermal management with consideration of natural convection. The temperature behavior of the battery and the melting behavior of PCM were investigated under different key parameters. In addition, the heat transfer mechanism of the melting process of the PCM was revealed. More importantly, the dimensionless temperature control performance (TCP) factor and the dimensionless heat storage performance (HSP) factor were introduced as new criteria to quantitatively evaluate the impact of different design parameters on the battery thermal management performance. The results showed that utilizing fins can significantly accelerate the melting of the PCM. Increasing the number of fins can reduce the temperature of the battery and improve the uniformity of the battery temperature distribution. Compared with the pure PCM, the total time required for PCM melting in the fin/PCM battery thermal management unit with different numbers of fins is reduced by at least 11.5%. The decrease of the time of complete PCM melting is not linearly correlated with the length ratio of fins. The fin number of N = 6, length ratio of R = 0.8, and angle between fins of φ = 36° were identified as the optimal parameters of fin/PCM composite structures. The TCP and HSP were enhanced by 38.1% and 4.54%, respectively. The conclusions of this work can provide reference for the accurate design of fin/PCM composite structures for the thermal management of AUV batteries. Highlights: The fin/phase change material composite structure was introduced for autonomous underwater vehicles' battery thermal management. The temperature and melting behavior were investigated with natural convection. The temperature control performance factor and heat storage performance factor were proposed as new evaluation criteria. Temperature deviation index was used to measure the battery temperature uniformity. The performance was enhanced by optimizing the design parameters of fin.