Battery Thermal Packaging Design

Principal Investigators

• Margaret Wiecek, Clemson University
• Georges Fadel, Clemson University

Research Associate

• Paolo Guarneri, Clemson University

Students

• Sreekanth Gondipalle, Ravi Teja Katragadda, Aravind Shanthakumar, Brian Dandurand, Wenshan Wang, Clemson University

Government

• Matthew Castanier, Mark Brudnak, U.S. Army GVSC

Industry

• Peter Fenyes, Bahram Khalighi, General Motors
• Dyche Anderson, Ford

Work involving this topic began in 2011 and was completed in 2013.

Prior ARC projects with these investigators (2006-2008, 2010) produced packaging approaches critical to the design of vehicle systems of increased complexity, including techniques for packaging with shape optimization, to compactly pack soft deformable objects of arbitrary (non-convex) shape, and for under-hood engine components. In this work, heat transfer issues due to the packaging of hybrid vehicle batteries are studied.

Battery life and performance are of key importance for developing electric and hybrid, military vehicles. One of the issues to be addressed is related to the heat rejection and the consequent cell operating temperature. Cell temperature uniformity is desirable to avoid any thermal and electric unbalance which may lead to performance degradation and premature failure. The packaging of the cell inside of the battery modules is an important design aspect when considering the battery thermal behavior.

The battery pack layout has to comply with the layout constraints and design requirements at the vehicle level as the battery is one of the components inside the vehicle. The optimal vehicle layouts depend on the shape of the battery that is determined by the cell layout. The vehicle and battery layout problems are formulated jointly as a hierarchical or bilevel optimization problem with the two levels sharing design variables. This bilevel problem however has multiple objective functions on each level and cannot be treated with well-known hierarchical formulations and methods such as Analytical Target Cascading (ATC) or Bilevel Programming (BP) because they have been developed for scalar-valued functions on each level. The research objective has been to solve the two-level problem with multiobjective optimization problem at each level.

This work connects closely to the following ARC projects:

• Neutron Imaging of Lithium Ion Batteries
• Modeling and Optimization of Electrified Propulsion Systems

Publications:

• H. Dong, P. Guarneri, G. M. Fadel, “Bi-level Approach to Vehicle Component Layout and Shape Morphing”, Journal of Mechancical Design, 133(4), 041008, May 18, 2011.
• W. Wang, M. Xu, P. Guarneri, V. Y. Blouin, G. M. Fadel, “A Distributed Coordination via Consensus Optimization for Analytical Target Cascading”, Proceeding of the AIAA/ISSMO, Indianapolis, IN, 2012.
• W. Wang, P. Guarneri, V. Y. Blouin, G. M. Fadel, “Decentralized Coordination Methods for Optimal Design of Decomposed Systems”, Proceeding of the ASME DETC, Chicago, IL, 2012.
• R. T. Katragadda, S. R. Gondipalle, P. Guarneri, G. Fadel, “Predicting the thermal performance for the multi-objective vehicle underhood packing optimization problem”, Proceedings of the ASME 38th Design Automation Conference, Volume 3: Parts A and B: 45028; DETC2012-71098, 745-752, August 2012.
• B. Dandurand, P. Guarneri, G. Fadel, M. W. Wiecek, “Equitable multiobjective optimization applied to the design of a hybrid electric vehicle battery”, Journal of Mechanical Design, 135(4), 2013.
• J. Reneke, S. Samson, M. Wiecek, G. Fadel, “Multidisciplinary Design Optimization under uncertainty: An Information Model Approach”, International Journal of Vehicle Design, Vol. 61, No. 1/2/3/4, January 2013.
• P. Gaurneri, J. Leverenz, M. M. Wiecek, G. Fadel, “Optimization of nonhierarchically decomposed problems”, Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics, Volume 246, Pages 312–319, July 2013.
• G. Fadel, P. Guarneri, S. R. Gondipalle, R. T. Katragadda, “Underhood layout design optimization with thermal aspects”, EURO-INFORMS, Rome, Italy, July 2013.
• P. Guarneri, B. Dandurand, G. Fadel, M. M. Wiecek, “Bilevel multiobjective packaging optimization”, EURO-INFORMS, Rome, Italy, July 2013.
• S. Tiwari, H. Dong, G. Fadel, P. Fenyes, A. Kloess, “A Physically-Based Shape Morphing Algorithm for Packing and Layout Applications” , International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing (IJIDeM), July 2014.