An optimal study of serpentine channel with various configurations based on response surface analysis

Abstract

The liquid-cooled battery thermal management system (BTMS) using cold plates is widely adopted to control the operating temperature of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles. The thermal performance of the cold plate is influenced by the configuration of the channels. To improve the temperature uniformity of batteries and reduce the power consumption of BTMS, the heat transfer and flow resistance of serpentine cold plates with various configurations were numerically investigated and optimized in this study. Two serpentine cold plates with different configurations of flow path (FP) are also studied. Channel width (W c), fin thickness (T f) and channel height (H c) were selected as key design parameters while maximum temperature difference (ΔT max) and pressure drop (ΔP) were chosen as objective functions. The response surface methodology (RSM) is applied to study the effects of the three design parameters and obtain the regression equations of ΔT max and ΔP. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is then adopted to optimize the structural parameters. It can be concluded that the cold plate with 4 FP and 6 straight channels (SC) in each FP (4FP-6SC) possesses better performance compared with 8FP-3SC under the same structure design. The channel width has a significant influence on the maximum temperature difference, while a larger channel height reduces the pressure drop greatly. The optimized results show that the pressure drop is decreased by 89.14% based on NSGA-II optimization while the maximum temperature difference is maintained within the proper rage, which indicate that the performance of the serpentine cold plate is effectively improved. The proposed methods and results can provide guidance for the structural design of the serpentine cold plate.