Development of Compact Battery Cooling System with Smart Diagnosis & Troubleshooting Tool for Small Commercial Vehicle 2023-28-0028

Battery cooling system plays a vital role in all kind of Electric vehicles. For Indian applications where vehicles will be subjected to slower speeds due to heavy traffic, higher ambient conditions and excess loading pattern in commercial vehicles, designing a Battery cooling system (BCS) is a challenging task. There are various options for cooling of battery i.e. Natural air cooled, forced air cooled, indirect cooling. This paper discusses about indirect coolant based cooling of battery of a small commercial vehicle. Battery cooling system works on the principle of Indirect cooling with the combination of vapor compression cycle and water-coolant mixture path. R134a gas used for VCRS system and for cooling system used 50-50% water glycol coolant mixture. For this type of battery cooling system typically There are challenges of packaging of various battery cooling parts, hose routing, pipe bends which may result in de aeration issues. If these challenges are not addressed upfront in design phase it may result into Range issues or even thermal incidences.

To take care of above challenges there is a need for quick performance checks during development, at end of line (EOL), field, and service. This paper discusses about the Battery cooling system design and development of BCS with Smart Diagnosis & Troubleshooting unified diagnostic service tool (UDS) which helps for auto de-aeration confirmation and all functionality checks. This smart tool not only reduces our effort of coolant de-aeration, also helps in BCS function check during development, series production and in field.