Enhancing the performance of liquid-based battery thermal management system by porous substrate minichannel

Abstract

Using lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles is a suitable replacement for fossil fuels but it has some challenges such as temperature increasing that reduced the efficiency of the system and make the possibility of fires and explosions. Porous media have high surface-to-volume ratios and therefore have a very effective role in the improvement of convection heat transfer. In this study, the effects of the porous material in cold plate minichannels for a prismatic battery thermal management system have been investigated by numerical simulation. In general, increasing the inlet velocity in a fully porous minichannel improves the cooling performance more than in a conventional (non-porous) channel. For inlet velocity of 0.05 m/s with a parallel flow arrangement, using the fully porous channel maintains the maximum temperature of the battery module at 38.1 °C, while the temperature difference is 12.7 °C. In a parallel-flow arrangement, the hydrothermal performance factor for fully porous minichannels at the inlet velocities of 0.05 m/s and 0.075 m/s are 52 % and 193 % more than conventional channels, respectively. The use of counter-flow arrangement in conventional channels makes the temperature more uniform, but in fully porous minichannels, it greatly reduces the uniformity of temperature distribution compared to the parallel-flow arrangement. Therefore, the application of the fully porous channels with the parallel-flow arrangement is proposed as an effective way of enhancing the thermal management of liquid-based batteries.