Advanced Battery Thermal Control and Thermal Run-Away Cascading Prevention System Using Thermal Phase Change Materials

"This project offers a solution for a low cost and highly efficient thermal management system for Li-Ion battery in electric vehicles while eliminating thermal runaway and cascading risks. This level of safety and performance is especially important in applications such as in electric vehicles due to requirements of high power, energy density, safety and cost.

One of the key innovations to prevent thermal runaway and cascading risk while not affecting cooling ability is accomplished by phase change materials that are in solid state during normal operating temperature - allowing heat transfer with coolant. However, in extreme temperature conditions outside normal operation - as during thermal runaway - the same materials phase change to permeable form to allow coolant to directly halt thermal runaway of the affected battery cell. Therefore, this mechanism locally and precisely dissipate heat before critical ""runaway"" temperature hence cease any possibility of the ""cascading effect"" or chain reaction from affecting adjacent cells.

Another important safety feature in our solutions is the low cost cell-level temperature sensors that can monitor temperature of individual cells to proactively manage any defective or problem cells. This approach also prevent any potential cascading effect to adjacent cells. This electronic system works in conjunction with the physical liquid cooling cycle to direct needed cooling to specific battery module. As a result, the thermal control system can act based on precise cell data within specific module which allow battery management to be predictive and proactive rather than reactive - making servicing and maintenance simpler and always targeted.

Finally, the entire construction and engineering of this system take end-of-life treatment into consideration. The design enables assembly and disassembly in 2 minutes using simple and low cost components. This unique feature allows end-of-life recycling and reuse to be much simpler than other types of battery manufacturing and assembly processes. In fact, a key motivation for the design is that each module can be repurposed for other energy applications - such as solar storage - as EV battery pack has remaining capacity of up to 80% at the end of vehicle's useful life. In most situation, these module can remains useful for often up to a decade for a second life as renewable energy storage or backup devices."