Design and optimization of an integrated liquid cooling thermal management system with a diamond-type channel

Abstract

The ability of the battery thermal management system (BTMS) to dissipate heat significantly impacts the operating performance and the service life of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Designing an effective and efficient BTMS is difficult due to its multiple parameters. Therefore, an integrated liquid cooling plate with a diamond-type flow channel was designed in this paper. Firstly, two arrangement plans (plan 1 and plan 2) were designed to investigate the effect of coolant flow direction in the channel on the cooling performance of BTMS. The simulation results indicated that plan 2 (the shorter main flow channel serves as the outlet) could lead to better cooling performance. The maximum temperature (Tmax) and the volume-average temperature (VAT) of the battery pack for plan 2 were 313.33 K and 308.79 K, respectively. Then, the surrogate model was developed by the Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), and the six parameters (F, Hc, Wb, WL, WS, and WIO) of the BTMS were optimized using the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA). The Tmax of the battery pack decreased from 313.33 K to 308.98 K, and the VAT decreased from 308.79 K to 306.06 K. The average pressure drop (Δp) between the inlets and outlets decreased significantly, from 1708.30 Pa to 520.10 Pa, up to 1188.20 Pa. It demonstrated that the BTMS achieved a balance between thermal performance and power consumption after optimization.