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Caleb Ramsay

Avionics - Battery Thermal Management

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I began the year by comparing liquid vs. air cooling systems and did preliminary calculations for both to establish the ideal cooling method based on a variety of factors. This lead to the choice of air cooling due to the lower weight requirements, and being able to utilize the cold fast moving air surrounding the aircraft during flight. With the choice of air cooling established, the majority of my second semester work involved creating a Computational Fluid Dynamics model of a section of battery cells. Completing this in ANSYS Fluent, I ran cooling, thermal runaway, and temperature maintenance scenarios successfully using boundary conditions determined using my preliminary calculations. Extracting data from these simulations, I then compared them to my initial calculations and found similar trends and final results for both demonstrating the validity of the CFD analysis.