Investigation on forced air-cooling strategy of battery thermal management system considering the inconsistency of battery cells

[Display omitted] •BTMS with extra vents and reciprocating airflow is proposed.•5 schemes with extra vents are designed and investigated.•A flexible cooling control method is developed.•Temperature uniformity of the battery pack is greatly improved after optimization. This paper proposes a thermal management system (BTMS) model with novel cooling scenarios by combining extra vents and reciprocating airflow. Primarily, the parameter settings and cooling scenarios of the reversible airflow are discussed, and the optimization brings a 4.0 K maximum temperature drop and 50.2% decrease of maximum temperature difference compared to the uni-directional airflow. Then four cases corresponding to four different locations of the abnormal cell with higher generation rate are processed to reveal the effectiveness of adding the variable-vents scenarios to the reciprocating airflow, which minimize the maximum temperature by 4.12 K, 6.52 K, 4.25 K and 3.24 K, and decrease the maximum temperature difference by 1.55 K, 1.95 K, 1.5 K and 1.24 K, respectively, compared to the optimized reciprocating flow alone. The results show that the appropriate extra vents scenario arrangement integrated with the reciprocating flow can bring a more uniform temperature field, which provide a practical reference for the design method and control strategy for the BTMS system.