Understanding Tesla’s Innovative Battery Cooling System

Sneak peek into Tesla vehicle’s impressive battery cooling system,

Tesla electric vehicles are arguably the most advanced and cutting-edge electric vehicles on the planet right now. These vehicles have a large battery pack under the hood and it’s powering the entire vehicle and the main problem with these large battery packs is the heating issue.

While other legacy car manufacturers are struggling with their battery issues, how in the world, Tesla is pushing the limits with their battery technology? Otherwise, how are they getting this performance out of their cars like this?

These types of stunts suck a high level of amperage from the pack, and it should get really hot. Let’s find out how the Tesla cooling system works.

First of all, while other manufacturers are putting pouch type battery cells into their vehicles, Tesla is the only company that pioneered building battery packs with thousands of small cylindrical cells. And they are being worked in this field for a long time, so Tesla has been refining its battery technology.

The performance of Lithium-Ion battery cells is greatly impacted by their temperature, they suffer from the Goldilocks effect, which is, they do not perform well when it’s too cold or too hot, which can lead to permanent and critical damage to the cells or faster degradation of the battery. 

So, not only cooling but also heating process of the cells may be required at lower ambient temperatures to prevent damage while fast charging when the cells are too cold to take the power, this is because their resistance of the inside battery cells rises due to cold temperature.

Most lithium battery cells cannot fast-charge when they are less than 5^oC and cannot charge at all when they are below 0 Celsius. Lithium cells also begin to degrade quickly when their temperature is above 45 Celsius.

 Mainly, there are 3 battery cooling methods if you are interested,

• Air cooling system passively or forced (Active).

• Cooling by flooding the battery with dielectric oil, which is then pumped out to a heat exchanger system.

• Cooling by the circulation of water-based coolant through a cooling passage within the battery structure.

Tesla has patented a cooling system that has a serpentine cooling pipe that winds through the battery pack and carries a flow of water-glycol coolant, thermal contact with the cells is from their sides by thermal transfer material. 

As you can see in below graph, coolant goes in circulates around each and every one of the cells then pumped out to a radiator and the heat will dissipate.

Each battery module has its own cooling system with separate radiators attached. Since the car constantly monitors the temperature of each module, the cooling system can specify to cool a specific module more than others if it gets too hot.

The constant monitoring and the cooling system is evenly distributed, I doubt certain modules ever get extremely hotter than others. Because the system is always monitoring the temperature of each module.

The battery pack should be able to get cooled and heated back and forth to create the perfect temperature range. This is done by a Battery Management System (BMS), it surely needs to be a pretty powerful system in order to adapt to these different battery usage scenarios.

This keeps the battery pack in a suitable temperature range of about 40 degrees to 50 degrees of Celsius. This temperature is perfect for short, peak performance like quick accelerations and top speed sprints that we have been seeing. And of course, that’s how they pulled track racing on Model “3”.

And if you’re familiar with Tesla, in the P100D variants of Model “S” and “X” supports ludicrous mode. This mode unleashes the outright maximum peak performance of the batteries, allowing the car to accelerate at ludicrous insane speeds.

Before enabling this mode, a notice will pop and say, the battery is preconditioning to around 50 degrees of Celsius. This is the temperature needed to access the maximum highest performance out of Tesla batteries.

On a final note, the cooling systems or HVAC systems can be varied according to the Tesla model.  There is some evidence that cheaper model 3 is having the most effective and efficient cooling system of their vehicles. But overall, each and every part of their vehicles are so considerably designed and equipped with bleeding-edge technology.

Hope you have a better idea about Tesla Battery Cooling system after reading this article. Feel free to share with your friends if you think they might be interested in this topic.

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