Experimental Investigation of Dual AC System Used for Battery Cooling Plate 2020-28-0021

As the global warming due to carbon footprint is very alarming, vehicle emissions are getting stringent day by day. In such situation vehicle hybridization or fully electric vehicles are of obvious choices. However in any of the cases the battery cooling is a big concern area. As the heat produced by the battery need to be dissipated in the long run, it is of utmost need to develop and understand the battery cooling system. Present paper describes the experimental investigation of a battery cooling circuit. A complete bench comprising of both primary and secondary circuit is used for the testing. The primary circuit has a cooling unit with TXV, condenser and electric compressor run by high voltage. The secondary circuit consists of a chiller (integrated with TXV) unit responsible for battery cooling. The whole circuit typically resembles with one of dual air conditioning unit and uses one of known refrigerant used in vehicle AC system. However each circuit is connected with a valve for controlling the loop. The battery heat was represented by equivalent amount of heat produced by a heating system, which provides the hot coolant and gets chilled at the chiller. Necessary instrumentation was done to capture the data. The system was evaluated experimentally with different conditions of coolant flow rate, battery heat generation and compressor rpm. Detailed investigation was done in order to understand the chiller performance. The study reveals very good insight to the battery cooling system and it is very helpful for designing the cooling system.