• Cooling plates with different coolant channels designed and evaluated based on CFD simulation. • Z-score method to evaluate effects by various inlet flow rates. • Better cooling performance by two cooling plates sandwiching one battery module. • Cooling plate design with multiple small flow channel optimized. Lithium-ion battery pack is widely used in electric vehicles (EVs), for which reasonable heat dissipation measures must be taken to keep battery working in a suitable temperature range. Liquid cooling is popular for its efficient heat dissipation performance. In order to evaluate the effect of layout and channel design of cooling plates on the heat dissipation of a battery module, numerical modeling and analyses were carried out. Two arrangements of the cooling plates with different coolant channels (i.e., single channel, multiple small channels, and S-shaped channel) are discussed. The Z-score method is applied to evaluate the six cooling plate designs with various inlet flow rates. It is found that the design with two cooling plates sandwiching one battery module shows a better cooling performance. In terms of the channel structures, the comprehensive performance of the cooling plates with multiple small flow channels is optimal, when inlet flow rate is between 7.817 × 10 −4 kg s −1 ∼ 0.0105 kg s −1 under the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) condition. 

Simulation of cooling plate effect on a battery module with different channel arrangement

Parametric investigation to optimize the thermal management of pouch type lithium-ion batteries with mini-channel cold plates

Lithium-ion batteries are currently the primary source of power for electric vehicles (EVs), but the batteries are sensitive to temperature changes. Excessively high or low temperatures will affect the batteries performance, causing thermal runaway and safety accidents. The battery thermal management system (BTMS) can maintain the batteries within a safe temperature range. This paper studied a liquid cooling BTMS incorporating serpentine microchannels. Firstly, we studied the arrangement of the inlet direction of serpentine microchannel cooling plates. The research demonstrated that for plan 3 (i.e., inlet and outlet are staggered), the BTMS has the best cooling performance. The maximum temperature of plan 3 is 311.2592 K, which is 0.6892 K lower than plan 1. Then, we selected plan 3 as the baseline. The surrogate assisted approach was conducted to parameterize and model the selected scheme. After that, the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) was used to optimize the parameters of the serpentine channel and water flow velocity. The optimization results indicated that the maximum temperature of the battery module dropped from 311.2592 K to 308.6067 K, the maximum pressure decreased from 578.9111 Pa to 502.0554 Pa, the average temperature decreased from 308.7952 K to 306.0020 K. After optimization, the temperature uniformity of the battery module is significantly improved, which provides guidance for improving the heat dissipation performance of the serpentine liquid cooling BTMS. Especially, the maximum pressure decreased by 13.28%, which can reduce the pumping power of the cooling water in the channel, and the consumption of energy of the EVs.

Heat dissipation optimization for a serpentine liquid cooling battery thermal management system: An application of surrogate assisted approach

The design of an optimized thermal management system for Li-ion batteries has challenges because of their stringent operating temperature limit and thermal runaway, which may lead to an explosion. In this paper, an optimized cooling system is proposed for kW scale Li-ion battery stack. A comparative study of the existing cooling systems; air cooling and liquid cooling respectively, has been carried out on three cell stack 70Ah LiFePO4 battery at a high discharging rate of 2C. It has been found that the liquid cooling is more efficient than air cooling as the peak temperature of the battery stack gets reduced by 30.62% using air cooling whereas using the liquid cooling method it gets reduced by 38.40%. The performance of the liquid cooling system can further be improved if the contact area between the coolant and battery stack is increased. Therefore, in this work, an immersion-based liquid cooling system has been designed to ensure the maximum heat dissipation. The battery stack having a peak temperature of 49.76 °C at 2C discharging rate is reduced by 44.87% to 27.43 °C after using the immersion-based cooling technique. The proposed thermal management scheme is generalized and thus can be very useful for scalable Li-ion battery storage applications also.

Design of an Optimized Thermal Management System for Li-Ion Batteries under Different Discharging Conditions

Experimental and simulation study of liquid coolant battery thermal management system for electric vehicles: A review

Study of battery thermal management is critical for safe and better performance of Lithium-ion batteries, considering several recent battery failures and explosions. Lithium-ion batteries are generally used in stacks to meet the high energy requirements. Thus, the heat generated in a battery pack must be properly managed for efficient operation. A battery thermal management system (BTMS) is an ideal tool to understand the thermal health of a battery. An attempt is made here to study the influence of water as the coolant on the battery thermal management. A variable heat generation that depends on the discharge rate is assumed in the simulations. A 5C charge/discharge rate (per hour) per battery and two packs of 5 batteries each are considered for the analysis. Due to symmetry only half pack (2.5 batteries) with symmetry boundary conditions is considered in the simulations. The influence of volume flow rate, flow direction, and contact area on the battery thermal behaviour are analysed. Results indicate that a 5C charge/discharge produces maximum temperatures of 319.31 K and 316.93 K at flow rates of 0.25 × 10 − 6 m3/s and 1.6 × 10 − 6 m3/s, respectively. Whereas, the uncooled batteries with 5C charge/discharge produces a maximum temperature of 336.623 K. Therefore, the uncooled peak temperature is estimated to be reduced by 5.85% by circulating the coolant at 1.6 × 10 − 6 m3/s. Furthermore, by reversing the direction of water flow in one of the channels, leads to redistribution of heat and hence the temperature distribution in the battery pack is observed to be more uniform. Flow reversal also helped to reduce the peak temperatures by 2.77 K in the battery pack. All the calculations are performed using the commercial software COMSOL.

Studies on thermal management of Lithium-ion battery pack using water as the cooling fluid

Influence of cracks on fracture strength and electric power losses in Silicon solar cells at high temperatures: deep machine learning and molecular dynamics approach

S.D.V.S.S. Varma Siruvuri

Papers

Studies on thermal management of Lithium-ion battery pack using water as the cooling fluid

Influence of cracks on fracture strength and electric power losses in Silicon solar cells at high temperatures: deep machine learning and molecular dynamics approach