Near-Zero-Energy Smart Battery Thermal Management Enabled by Sorption Energy Harvesting from Air
Jiaxing Xu, Jingwei Chao, Tingxian Li, Taisen Yan, Si Wu, Minqiang Wu, Bingchen Zhao, R.Z. Wang
Abstract
Effective battery thermal management (BTM) is critical to ensure fast charging/discharging, safe, and efficient operation of batteries by regulating their working temperatures within an optimal range. However, the existing BTM methods not only are limited by a large space, weight, and energy consumption but also hardly overcome the contradiction of battery cooling at high temperatures and battery heating at low temperatures. Here we propose a near-zero-energy smart battery thermal management (SBTM) strategy for both passive heating and cooling based on sorption energy harvesting from air. The sorption-induced reversible thermal effects due to metal-organic framework water vapor desorption/sorption automatically enable battery cooling and heating depending on the local battery temperature. We demonstrate that a self-adaptive SBTM device with MIL-101(Cr)@carbon foam can control the battery temperature below 45 °C, even at high charge/discharge rates in hot environments, and realize self-preheating to ∼15 °C in cold environments, with an increase in the battery capacity of 9.2%. Our approach offers a promising route to achieving compact, liquid-free, high-energy/power-density, low-energy consumption, and self-adaptive smart thermal management for thermo-related devices.