Thermal management of batteries using a hybrid supercapacitor architecture

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. This type of approaches that target the enhancement of the cooling efficiency via the reduction of the thermal resistance 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 discharging 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 shows that the proposed method can keep the battery temperature within the safe range without external cooling devices while exploiting the advantage of the battery-supercapacitor parallel connection.