Project Summary
Qdot seek to apply battery thermal management to enable extremely fast charging and maximise the reliability of cell systems by ensuring even thermal performance during operation. The team will be developing a proprietary cooling solution for batteries that allows recharging for 200 miles of range in 10 minutes.
Project Achievements
- Identified new solutions through analysis of existing data, design and conjugate fluid dynamics simulation, with real-world testing and verification.
- Developed novel solution reducing the number of heatsinks needed by a factor of 6 in the battery pack, while maintaining thermal performance. –
- Direct application to Li-ion cells was not possible due to issues in the manufacture of pouch cells. Uniform tab cooling was demonstrated at proof-of-concept level in a cell mockup system. –
- Temperature gradients across cell tabs were decoupled from the coolant flow rate; the gradient for a low-power input system reduced from 5°C to 1.2°C. This gives a cell life improvement of 25% for XFC and a reduction in battery thermal management system parasitic mass to less than 4% of total battery pack; a 55% reduction over Qdot’s current design.
Next Steps
- Continue concept development and experimentally analyse at the multi-cell level.
- Apply new cooling system solution to the next generation battery module to allow XFC.
- Further development will be undertaken to reduce the mass and improve manufacturability for application in the electrification of aerospace, where the cell thermal performance is critical to the system viability.
