Project Goals & Deliverables

Over COVID, we had to operate remotely on the FSAE team since our campus was shut down. As a result, this thermal analysis project was born!

I was the Battery Lead at this point in time, and coordinated Battery team activities but contributed technically to this analysis project as an IC. I was responsible for understanding and modeling the behavior of our forced air cooling design in our HV pack. In this project, I determined the heat transfer coefficient analytically, created a 2D heat transfer model in MATLAB with my teammate, and ran a 3D CFD simulation in Simscale for comparison.

We were able to leave the project off with conclusions about what testing we needed to do to further correlate the models we had created. See slides below for more details on the execution of the project.

Key Learnings

This was the first in-depth thermal analysis project I'd worked on, and I found that I really enjoyed heat transfer as a topic. Some of the technical learnings I gained were:

• Always do a conservative 1D hand calc to double check that your more complicated 2D / 3D model outputs are within the right magnitude
• All models are wrong, and some models are just slightly less wrong — always do testing to correlate the models!
• Battery thermal modeling can get complicated and interesting since battery DCIR can change axially vs radially depending on the form factor, and it changes based on temperature as well

Detailed Slidedeck