An innovative battery thermal management with thermally induced flexible phase change material

•A novel battery thermal management with flexible phase change material is proposed.•The assembly of proposed thermal management design is facile and technically simple.•The thermal contact heat transfer characteristic is investigated experimentally.•The thermal management performance is evaluated under different load profiles. Traditional battery thermal management (BTM) with phase change material (PCM) is constrained by the problems of leakage, low thermal conductivity and high rigidity of PCM from the assembly perspective. Herein, we report an innovative and facile BTM with thermally induced flexible composite PCM (FCPCM). In this design, battery could be clinched to the FCPCM with an interference fit because of the thermally induced flexibility and shape recovery of FCPCM. Such an assembly is designed to be compact and efficient with no need for thermal grease. The steady-state measurement results show that different phase states of PCM have different thermal interface properties. The integration associated with the shape recovery of FCPCM could cause a low thermal contact resistance between battery and FCPCM. As a result, the constructed passive BTM exhibits an excellent thermal control performance. When the battery is discharged from 100% to 0% charge state, the maximum temperature of FCPCM based BTM is 43.4 °C during 2.5C discharge rate, which is 28.8 °C lower than No PCM. For the conditions of dynamic stress test and charge–discharge cycle, it shows lower temperature fluctuation within the acceptable range and the long-time function of latent heat of PCM could be recovered. With these prominent performances, the BTM performed here with respect to assembly methods and process flexibility will provide insights into the passive BTM system.