Advanced Thermal Management for Electric Bike Batteries: Cooling and Monitoring

Currently, electric bikes (E-bike) are considered the most promising solution for replacing traditional Internal combustion engine (IC) bikes. Battery technology is the most important concept to be considered while designing an electric bike. This ensures safe and reliable operations of the battery. Lithium-ion batteries are used as primary source of power in many e-bikes. These are very sensitive to the temperature, when the battery pack gets too hot or cold, battery performance may decrease significantly. In addition, the batteries get overheated during long use and potentially catch fire or even explode and harm users. Thermal management system is crucial to address this issue and ensure the safety of the drivers. This paper presents design considerations for a liquid cooling system and addresses the selection of optimal coolant. Furthermore, this paper presents results from simulations performed using MATLAB/Simulink Simscape two-fluids software. Additionally, this paper explores the integration of advanced battery state estimation algorithms within the battery management system (BMS) to estimate the battery state of charge (SOH), State of health (SOH) and Charge-rate (C-rate).