Abstract
West Japan Railway Company (JR WEST) has been developing battery-powered trains for the purpose of decreasing the negative environmental impact of diesel rail-cars in non-electrified sections of track. Storage battery systems need to be of a large capacity in order to supply all the required electric power for the propulsion of the rail-cars in these sections. However, installation space is limited due to the size of trains. Therefore, high integration and high capacity at the same time are needed to pursue stable operation. In order to solve this problem, by choosing battery cells with a high energy density, storage battery systems were arranged in two different configurations: Type A has flat voltage characteristics, and type B has linear voltage characteristics. A rise in the temperature of the system may occur due to the improvement in the energy density of these batteries. That may affect the safety and lifespan of the system. Therefore, a thermal simulation and an examination using an actual model were conducted to get a grasp of the thermal properties of the system. In this report, we introduce an outline of our battery system and the results obtained from studying cooling methods.
