Hybrid Heat Sinks for Thermal Management of Passively Cooled Battery Chargers
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Received: 4 September 2020 Revised: 3 November 2020 Accepted: 21 November 2020 DOI: 10.1002/er.6260 RESEARCH ARTICLE Hybrid heat sinks for thermal management of passively cooled battery chargers Gurpreet Singh Sodhi1,2 | Chris Botting3 | Eric Lau3 | Muthukumar Palanisamy2 | Mina Rouhani1 | Majid Bahrami1 1Laboratory for Alternative Energy Conversion (LAEC), School of Summary Mechatronic Systems Engineering, Simon Battery chargers are an important component in electric and plug-in hybrid Fraser University (SFU), Surrey, British vehicles and various other clean energy systems. The thermal management in Columbia, Canada battery charger is a crucial aspect that influences its overall performance and 2Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, cyclic stability. Passive cooling technology using heat sinks is preferred in Guwahati, India developing battery chargers due to its reliability, quietness, and efficiency 3 Delta-Q Technologies, Burnaby, British (no parasitic power). In the present work, new hybrid passive heat sinks Columbia, Canada (HPHS) with various fin geometries, namely inclined interrupted fins, pin fins, Correspondence and straight interrupted fins, have been developed by adding a phase change Muthukumar Palanisamy, Department of material (PCM) layer to passively cooled bare fin heat sinks (BFHS). The devel- Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, oped heat sinks have the same geometric footprint as that of the battery char- Assam 781039, India. ger, IC650 built by the industrial partner of the project Delta-Q Technologies. Email: [email protected] Experimental investigations were carried out to analyze the effects of PCM Majid Bahrami, Laboratory for Alternative quantities and continuous (80-120 W) and intermittent (duty cycle operation) Energy Conversion (LAEC), School of thermal loads on the heating-cooling performance of the HPHS. Temperature Mechatronic Systems Engineering, Simon contours obtained using infrared images show that the proposed HPHS pro- Fraser University (SFU), Surrey, BC V3T 0A3, Canada. vides a more uniform temperature with reduced hot spots compared to BFHS. Email: [email protected] The heating and cooling performances of straight interrupted fins-based HPHS Funding information were found better for all thermal loads and PCM quantities tested due to their The Canadian Queen Elizabeth II smaller thermal resistance. Increasing the PCM volume fraction from 0.2 to Diamond Jubilee Scholarships; SSHRC; 0.6 improves the load shedding capacity. However, the added thermal resis- IDRC tance requires optimal consideration. While conducting different cyclic opera- tions for inclined interrupted fins-based HPHS, a maximum overall thermal management ratio of 0.45 was achieved. The proposed HPHS minimizes the temperature fluctuations more effectively while operating at high loads and shorter duty periods. This new passively cooled hybrid heat sink can notably improve the overall performance and reliability of battery chargers during both continuous and intermittent operations. KEYWORDS battery charger, hybrid heat sink, passive cooling, phase change material, thermal management Int J Energy Res. 2021;45:6333–6349. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/er © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 6333 6334 SODHI ET AL. 1 | INTRODUCTION the volumetric energy storage density and the cost of the cooling system. In some cases, increasing the volume Electric vehicle (EV) and plug-in hybrid vehicle markets fraction of additives hampers the natural convection flow are making rapid developments to cut the reliance on fos- of the PCM due to a drastic rise in the liquid phase vis- sil fuels with a projected reduction of 127 million tonnes cosity.22 Thermal conductivity enhancers such as fins of oil equivalent by 2030.1 A growth rate of 15% in EV have low thermal resistance and act as a prime heat demands is expected in the next decade.2 This necessi- transfer interface between the device and PCM or the tates technological advances in electric powertrain engi- environment. neering and improvement in the charging infrastructure. The proposed hybrid passive heat sinks (HPHS) offer It is worth mentioning that the battery charging facilities a combination of existing heat sink topology with inte- need comprehensive enhancements, such as rapid charg- grated PCM to act as a buffer for peak load shaving. The ing rates to address the projected rise in EVs. The classi- selection of PCM is based on properties such as melting cal Moore's law forecasts the current increasing trend of temperature and energy storage density suitable for the electronic chip performances with increasing transistor application, whereas fin topology needs careful optimiza- density and reduction of size.3,4 Due to the miniaturiza- tion. Our team at Simon Fraser University (SFU) has tion of components, the failure rate of electronic devices made notable contributions to the design and optimiza- increases exponentially because of thermal stress.5 The tion of heat sink topology for passively cooled sys- significance of thermal management technology reflects tems.23,24 In addition to the heat sink design, a successful on its growing market which is projected to increase from HPHS needs to be compatible with the applications. Bat- $12.4 billion in 2018 to $16.3 billion by 2023.6 Therefore, tery charging technology, which is the focus of the pre- efficient, reliable cooling is one of the foremost concerns sent study, faces intricate challenges to develop reliable, to be addressed in power-electronic devices including bat- efficient, and affordable devices. The key considerations tery chargers. include: (a) peak shaving of the operating load as the bat- Significant research works have been carried out tery chargers start to de-rate at elevated temperatures using different active/passive cooling technologies, and (b) intermittent operation with frequent power namely heat-pipe-assisted cooling,7,8 thermoelectric ON/OFF cycles. Hence, the proposed HPHS is a great cooling,9 cooling using microchannels,10,11 and the use of candidate for thermal management requirements of bat- thermal conductivity enhancers, such as fins.12 The suc- tery chargers. The fin topology plays an important role in cess of these methods is dependent on the size of the the heat transfer characteristics of a heat sink–based bat- device, cost-effectiveness, reliability, availability of tech- tery charger. A summary of HPHS studied in the litera- nology, and ergonomics of the design. Passive cooling ture which used fins as thermal conductivity enhancers is technologies are widely preferred due to zero parasitic listed in Table 1. power consumption, noise-free operation, and higher Three different types of PCM heat sink configura- reliability compared to active cooling technologies.13 tions have been investigated. Firstly, employing PCM Electronic cooling has evolved significantly by incorpo- cavities on microprocessor chips, which have an inher- rating thermal energy storage, which is instrumental in ent disadvantage due to low thermal conductivity of the effective thermal management of devices. Phase PCMs and, hence, low heat dissipation rate. Such change materials (PCMs) used for this purpose function designs are beneficial only if high thermal conductivity as an energy storage buffer and assist in “peak shaving” additives such as expanded graphite33 and graphene20 of the device load during phase change. PCMs have had a areaddedtothePCM.Zarmaetal34 studied series and remarkable impact especially on the battery thermal parallel arrangements of multicavity heat sink filled management system (BTMS) in thermal load shed- with nanoparticle-enhanced PCM to control the temper- ding.14,15 PCMs control the temperature peaks and main- ature of a concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) system. They tain uniform temperature in batteries provided that the concluded that parallel multicavity arrangement pro- selection of the melting temperature of PCM is appropri- vided higher heat dissipation rate due to better contact ate.16 Paraffins are most suitable for thermal manage- of the metal surfaces with the CPV heat transfer sur- ment applications with a melting temperature range faces. In the second design, fins submerged in PCMs are between 25C and 85C but suffer from a low thermal used as thermal conductivity enhancers to improve the conductivity of ~0.1 to 0.4 W/m/K.17 Adding thermally heat transfer characteristics of the PCM enclosed in con- conductive materials, such as expanded graphite,18 tainers. Most of the studies presented in Table 1 have multiwalled carbon nanotubes,19 graphene nanoplates,20 used this design and investigated the effect of fin charac- and using copper foam,21 improve the heat transfer char- teristicssuchasgeometry,finvolumetoPCMvolume acteristics of the PCM, but these additives compromise ratio, and material25-27,30,31 on the heat sink SODHI ET AL. 6335 TABLE 1 Summary of literature on HPHS using fins as Ghanbarpour et al38 numerically analyzed plate-fin thermal conductivity enhancers hybrid heat sinks combined with a heat pipe. They References Key findings/notes observed a significant reduction in the maximum heat sink temperature, which was mainly influenced by the Ali et al25 • Comparison of square and cylindrical pin fin heat transfer dissipation capacity of the fins exposed to geometries for equal fin volume. • Cylindrical pin fins showed better thermal the ambient air. In spite of several benchmark studies management. discussing