Determination of thermal contact conductance between thin metal sheets of battery tabs

A novel method combining experimental test and heat transfer modeling was developed to determine the thermal contact conductance (TCC) between thin metal sheets as a function of contact pressures. In the experiment, thin metal samples were sandwiched between one white light transparent and one infrared (IR) transparent glass disks pressed together under different pressure levels. The metal stack was then heated up from the white light transparent side by an intense short pulse of flash light. The temperature transient on the other side was measured by an IR camera. To obtain a value of TCC, two separate experiments having different layers of thin sheet materials were performed and the values of maximum temperature rise were measured. Numerical heat transfer modeling was used to calculate the temperature evolution in the stack-up comprised of metal layers sandwiched between two glass disks. The heat transfer calculation results showed that TCC had a strong correlation to the ratio of maximum temperature rise between the two experiment configurations, but it was insensitive to the variations of other thermal properties. Thus, for a given pair of metal sheets in contact, a unique correlation between the TCC and the ratio of temperature rise was established using the heat transfer calculation. Such correlation allows the direct determination of the TCC value from the ratio of the experimentally measured temperature rise. The TCC between three types of thin metal sheets (i.e., 0.2-mm-thick Al, 0.2-mm-thick Cu and 0.9-mm-thick Cu) were measured and compared with the available literature data.