Experimental investigation of the thermal performance of silicon cold plate for battery thermal management system

Abstract

In order to fulfill the energy utilization for electric vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles, a novel liquid cooling system for battery thermal management (BTM) is designed in this paper. Combing the excellent cooling effect of copper tubes and silicon cold plates with flexible and elastic adhered on batteries, the as-constructed silicon cold plates coupled with copper tubes is a feasible and efficient approach with a more suitable temperature and a smaller temperature difference. For comparison, a silicon cold plate based natural air cooling and forced air convection cooing system for BTM were designed. The experiment results revealed that the natural air-cooling system was hardly to satisfy the requirements of temperature in application, meanwhile, even though the forced air cooling system could enhance the heat dissipation at a certain degree, it was not enough to control the temperature of the module below 45 °C during cycling test. Nevertheless, the silicon cold plate coupled with copper tubes can absorb the heat quickly and transfer it through the water flowing in the copper tube efficiently, the optimal fluid cooling system could control the maximum temperature below 41.92 °C and temperature difference within 1.78 °C under the conditions of middle flow direction at 8 ml/s volume flow rate. In addition, the energy consumption of copper tube based liquid system for battery module was decreased by 47.4% than forced convection air cooling system. These investigations are expected to afford an effective insight for designing and optimizing thermal management system for battery module.