Battery Chiller Test Setup

Battery Chiller

When a device uses power continuously for a long time, it heats up (ex: laptop). If it gets too hot, you will slowly ruin your batteries. In EVs, a chiller is used to keep the system cool. It works by cooling down a liquid and pumping it through the system constantly, absorbing heat and expelling it into the outside air.

Convincing Customers to Buy

If the batteries on an EV get too hot, this can reduce their State of Health (SoH), which reduces the max range and is thus vital to an EV. Unfortunately, chillers are quite expensive, both in cost and size, so our customers don't want to buy them unless they know they absolutely have to. I created a system to collect data to convince customers to buy chillers.

Electrical

We needed to collect data on the temperature of the environment & coolant (before & after entering pack), flow rate, and more. To do this, I used a Do-More BRX PLC, which allowed me to collect data from many input types as well as control outputs, such as controlling the water pump based on water supply.

Do-More BRX PLC

Programming

To program the PLC, I used Do-More Designer, a free software designed for our PLC. It uses a kind of programming called ladder-based programming, which has these "rungs" as you can see on the left. It's very good at facilitating several different groups of code, which is exactly what we needed for this project.

Read About Ladder Logic

Plumbing

The plumbing part of my system is relatively simple. The coolant comes from the tank, down through the pump, into the battery in the shipping container, into the chiller, and then back into the tank.