Electrothermal modeling and experimental validation of a LiFePO4 battery cell

Thermal modeling of the battery is an effective way to understand how the design and operating variables affect the thermal behavior of the battery during its operation. This paper presents a method for modeling the three-dimensional electrical and thermal behavior of a high energy lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO₄) battery cell. The model takes into account the irreversible resistive heat and reversible entropic heat generation to predict the temperature distribution in a battery. The simulation results of the voltage discharge curves coincide very well with the experimental results. The reasonable agreement of the temperature distributions at different constant discharge and pulse discharge conditions between the simulation and the experiment also demonstrates the validity of the proposed electrothermal model.