In Ansys Fluent, the battery model mainly focuses on conducting thermal analysis of a battery cell or battery pack. During normal operation, a battery produces heat. To compute the heat generation rate, a coupled thermal-electrochemical simulation is used. Depending on how thermal and electro-chemical behaviors of a battery are coupled, FLUENT provides four different solution methods:
CHT coupling method
FMU-CHT coupling method
Circuit Network solution method
MSMD solution method
In the first two methods, the electro-chemical aspect of a battery system is not resolved in Ansys Fluent. Rather, the heat generation rate is either specified directly or obtained in other software through using the functional mockup unit (FMU).
In the last two methods, the electro-chemical aspect of the battery is solved in Ansys Fluent.
Theoretical information about these methods is presented in the following sections: