The thermal behavior of the cylindrical battery was examined with composite paraffin and fin structure through experimental measurements and benchmarking with other thermal management techniques. The mock-up cylindrical battery, made of aluminum, had vertical straight fins as enlarged heat transfer area to submerge in the paraffin wax as phase change material (PCM) with a maximum melting temperature of 44 degrees C. For the pure PCM case, the melting process could be divided into AB segment with battery temperature ramp-up, BC segment with a clear-cut temperature plateau, and CE segment to reach complete melting, which is also basically represented in the evolutionary trend for the battery top to bottom temperature variation. The instantaneous Nusselt number would increase around the CE segment with a small portion of unmelted PCM as visualized by the numerical analysis, but the battery temperature would ramp up from the plateau in spite of the incomplete melt. Thermal enhancement with the PCM-fin cases was examined experimentally and the logarithmic dependence of the time-averaged Nusselt number is correlated with the heat transfer area ratio. In addition, the effective thermal control point C is found to relate to the melting front intersecting the bottom of the metal housing, and the corresponding thermal resistance is used to benchmark the thermal performance of PCM based thermal management systems. Independent of heating power, such a parameter can be correlated with the melting temperature to the ambient temperature difference for existing thermal management systems. It is found that the present composite PCM-fin system had the advantages of good thermal performance with prolonged work time. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.