Hey ya’ll
I’m part of a solarcar team, and part of our designing of the car is the design of a battery pack/battery modules. In the past, we have used ABS plastic, but I was wondering if anyone knows of resins that were thermally conductive as to distribute heat, but electrically insulative as to not set our pack on fire, all while having decent mechanical properties.
Any ideas?
We have datasheets published for each of our materials. We haven’t done thermal conductivity testing but I suspect High Temp Resin would be your best bet due to high material density and thermal resistance.
I worked with many customers who were potting low voltage batteries for harsh environments (wildlife GPS tracking). Usually they were trying to keep moisture out and protect the cells from shock. This was easy to accomplish with two-part polyurethane casting materials in the 70-80 Shore D range (ABS is about 80D). For thermal conductivity, you need to start adding fillers and usually those fillers are metallic based (like aluminum). Depending on the voltage, the metal content may present issues with conductivity. It’s a bit of a catch-22. You might also want to engineer a heat sink set up where you have a thermally conductive adhesive like this: http://www.arcticsilver.com/index.html# and cast a thermally conductive material around the rest.