Experimental and Numerical Investigation on Thermal Management of an Outdoor Battery Cabinet

Many forms of electronic equipment such as battery packs and telecom equipment must be stored in harsh outdoor environment. It is essential that these facilities be protected from a wide range of ambient temperatures and solar radiation. Temperature extremes greatly reduce lead-acid based battery performance and shorten battery life. Therefore, it is important to maintain the cabinet temperature within the optimal values between 20oC and 30oC to ensure battery stability and to extend battery lifespan. To this end, cabinet enclosures with proper thermal management have been developed to house such electronic equipment in a highly weather tight manner, especially for battery cabinet.

In this paper, the flow field and temperature distribution inside an outdoor cabinet are studied experimentally and numerically. The battery cabinets house 24 batteries in two configurations namely, two-layer configuration and six-layer configuration respectively. The cabinet walls are maintained at a constant temperature by a refrigeration system. The cabinet’s ability to protect the batteries from an ambient temperature as high as 50oC is studied. An experimental facility is developed to measure the battery surface temperatures and to validate the numerical simulations. The differences between the experimental and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) results are within 5%.