Experimental Study on Low-Temperature Thermal Management of Lithium Battery with Pulsating Heat Pipe

To address the serious decline in charge and discharge performance of lithium batteries in low temperatures, this paper proposes a thermal management scheme with pulsating heat pipes, which effectively achieves the advantages of pulsating heat transfer in heat pipes and large-scale equalization heating in aluminum plates. Optimal energy consumption thermal management strategies (OECTMS) and optimal performance thermal management strategies (OPTMS) were proposed. The OECTMS aims to reduce the system energy consumption while ensuring thermal management performance, whereas the OPTMS is intended to maximize the performance of the heating system, ensuring that lithium batteries achieve optimal thermal and electrical performance. Experimental results show that in low-temperature discharge scenarios (−10 °C, −20 °C, and −30 °C), compared with batteries without TMS, the OECTMS implements intermittent heating for the battery, achieving discharge capacities as high as 60.06 Ah, 54.76 Ah, and 48.66 Ah, which correspond to increases of 10.67%, 14.11%, and 29.83%, respectively. For the OPTMS, which applies continuous heating to the battery, the discharge capacities are increased by 19.5%, 23.7%, and 56.6% compared with batteries without TMS at a 0.5C rate. Notably, the battery with the OPTMS, which originally could not discharge at all under −30 °C, achieves a discharge capacity of 61.55 Ah, exhibiting a higher discharge capacity at a 1.5C rate. Furthermore, compared with the OECTMS, the battery temperature under the OPTMS is consistently maintained above 0 °C, and the temperature changes stably throughout the discharge process without temperature spikes. This manuscript introduces pulsating heat pipe technology and proposes a novel low-temperature thermal management scheme and provides new insights for the efficient operation of lithium batteries in low-temperature environments.