Inter-cell thermal barrier materials for battery modules: Safety-thermal-management trade-offs across conductive, insulating, and phase-change layers

초록

Inter-cell barriers can delay thermal-runaway propagation (TRP) but may impair normal-operation heat rejection. This study uses a three-dimensional structured thermal-resistance model to compare aluminum, mica laminate, silica aerogel, pure paraffin, and composite phase change material (PCM) barriers under identical module geometry and loading. Abuse performance is defined by the time at which the spatially averaged protected-cell temperature first reaches 150 degrees C; fast-charge performance is assessed using peak cell temperature and non-uniformity. In the conduction-dominant baseline, this threshold is reached at 848 s for aluminum, 873 s for composite PCM, 986 s for mica, and 990 s for pure paraffin. Silica aerogel does not reach the threshold by the end of the recorded observation window and is therefore reported as right-censored rather than assigned an exact delay. A Rosseland radiative-conductivity sensitivity and a generic bypass-conductance sensitivity indicate that the silica result depends strongly on heat-transfer paths omitted from the baseline; neither surrogate resolves view-factor radiation or vent-gas transport. In the modeled cases, stronger insulation delays protected-cell heating but raises fast-charge temperatures, whereas conductive barriers show the opposite tradeoff. A hypothetical enhanced-PCM property target reaches the 150 degrees C threshold at 1191 s while maintaining a modeled fast-charge peak temperature near 30.0 degrees C. This case is an aspirational parametric point, not a demonstrated material. The results establish a within-model benchmark and identify the joint roles of thermal resistance, sensible and latent storage, and normal-operation cooling.

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