Abstract

Efforts to increase the distance travelled by electrically-driven vehicles include weight reduction of the vehicle, increase of battery efficiency, improvement of efficiency of the driving part etc. When the heating system is operated, reduced mileage of the electrically driven vehicle is about 30 ~ 50 %. In order to improve the efficiency of the battery, thermal management of the battery is important. Existing electrically-driven vehicles have two separate heaters, one for battery warm-up and the other for indoor heating, which increases the weight of vehicle. In this paper, an induction coolant heater has been investigated to enable not only fast warm-up of the battery but also indoor heating at the same time.
The experiment was performed by changing the flow rate of cooling water flowing into the battery and the indoor heater at a ratio of 8:2, 5:5 and 2:8. The experimental results show that the warm-up time of the battery decreases with increasing flow rate to the battery, however, it is not linearly proportional to the flow rate.