Bidirectional symmetrical parallel mini-channel cold plate for energy efficient cooling of large battery packs

Abstract

Liquid-cooled battery thermal management system with cold plate shows great potential for cooling battery packs in electric vehicles due to its merits of large heat transfer coefficient and good sealing performance. However, current design of cold plate leads to large temperature difference in battery packs, especially in the case with large battery packs. Besides, the pump energy consumption is usually high, which shortens the endurance of electric vehicles. In this paper, a parallel mini-channel cold plate (PMCP) for large battery packs is designed to reduce the temperature difference of the system. Numerical method is adopted to evaluate the performance of the PMCP, which is further demonstrated by experiment. Then a bidirectional symmetrical cold plate is designed to reduce both temperature difference and energy consumption. Positions of the outlets of the bidirectional symmetrical cold plates are adjusted to further improve the system performance. Finally, the designed cold plates are used for cooling large battery packs. Compared with systems equipped with traditional PMCP, the temperature difference in battery pack and the energy consumption of the system with designed PMCP are reduced by 77% and 82%, which shows that the designed PMCP significantly improves the system cooling and energy saving performance.