Abstract
Electric vehicles (EVs) are an important means to solve energy and environment problems. However, their deployment has been hampered by their high cost, their short cruising range and the lack of charging facilities, as well as their long charging time. Those problems are expected to be rapidly solved by the fast and steady technical progresses worldwide and, the massive adoption of EVs is expected to start from around 2025. As an example, in order to reduce the EVs charging time to less than 6 minutes, a 350kW super-rapid charger was developed and a large current charging battery is currently under development. The main concern of charging a battery with 350kW within 6 minutes is that the battery cells may exceed the maximum allowed temperature of 60℃. Therefore, we investigated cooling methods and found out that the most effective one is to use Phase Change Materials (PCMs) to absorb the heat generated by the cells. In this paper, we confirm using simulations that the PCM cooling technology can keep the battery cells below 60℃. We also investigated the issue of heat radiation for PCM.
