Design and optimization of liquid-cooled plate structure for power battery of the pure electric excavator

Abstract

With the increasing pressure of energy transformation and environmental protection, the trend of electrification of construction machinery is becoming more and more obvious. In this paper, based on a small pure electric excavator which is still in the stages of research and development, a liquid-cooled heat dissipation structure (liquid-cooled plate) is designed according to the power battery pack scheme. The overall shape of the liquid-cooled plate is designed as a symmetrical serpentine flow channel. Geometrically, the symmetrical serpentine flow channel is a combination of a straight flow channel and a runway-shaped flow channel. Then the conjugate heat transfer simulation model was established by using the CFD software Ansys Fluent. The results show that the initial scheme can not guarantee the temperature homogeneity of the battery pack. Therefore, the liquid-cooled heat dissipation scheme was optimized and compared. Firstly, a liquid-cooled plate was added on the original basis, and multiple sets of simulations were carried out with the length of the linear flow channel as a variable. The results show that appropriately increasing the length of the straight flow channel at the entrance of the liquid-cooled plate has a marked effect on improving the heat dissipation performance.