Numerical investigation of the thermal management of the hexagonal finned lithium-ion battery pack cooled by the PCM material

Abstract

This research analyzes the challenges in managing the thermal loading of a series of cells making up a 17S lithium-ion battery pack. A 17S lithium-ion battery pack has an operational voltage of 61.2 V (17 × 3.6) with an upper limit of 71.4 V (17 × 4.2). This makes it useful in high-voltage applications, such as in motorcycles. Hence, this study has been designed to create a battery thermal management system by various combinations of the phase change materials copper foam and hexagonal fins. For that, finned and non-finned battery pack designs have been created and tested using ANSYS Fluent 2025 R 2 . The design of the battery pack that includes fins is made up of 17S lithium-ion cells, hexagonal fins, and a Phase Change Material (PCM). The design of the non-finned battery pack lacks fins and is cooled through a similar arrangement of PCM. Moreover, the thermal performance of the hexagonal-finned design was then compared with the non-finned battery pack design. Also, the designs of both the finned and non-finned battery packs were tested with paraffin wax, copper foam, n-eicosane, and NOCT as PCM. The results showed that with the finned battery pack, n-eicosane performed best out of the other PCMs. However, with the non-finned battery pack, NOCT performed better than the other PCMs. This happened because with the non-finned configuration, the PCM material’s thermal conductivity remains low, which leads to problems with heat transfer within the material.