Heat dissipation optimization for a serpentine liquid cooling battery thermal management system: An application of surrogate assisted approach

Abstract

Lithium-ion batteries are currently the primary source of power for electric vehicles (EVs), but the batteries are sensitive to temperature changes. Excessively high or low temperatures will affect the batteries performance, causing thermal runaway and safety accidents. The battery thermal management system (BTMS) can maintain the batteries within a safe temperature range. This paper studied a liquid cooling BTMS incorporating serpentine microchannels. Firstly, we studied the arrangement of the inlet direction of serpentine microchannel cooling plates. The research demonstrated that for plan 3 (i.e., inlet and outlet are staggered), the BTMS has the best cooling performance. The maximum temperature of plan 3 is 311.2592 K, which is 0.6892 K lower than plan 1. Then, we selected plan 3 as the baseline. The surrogate assisted approach was conducted to parameterize and model the selected scheme. After that, the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) was used to optimize the parameters of the serpentine channel and water flow velocity. The optimization results indicated that the maximum temperature of the battery module dropped from 311.2592 K to 308.6067 K, the maximum pressure decreased from 578.9111 Pa to 502.0554 Pa, the average temperature decreased from 308.7952 K to 306.0020 K. After optimization, the temperature uniformity of the battery module is significantly improved, which provides guidance for improving the heat dissipation performance of the serpentine liquid cooling BTMS. Especially, the maximum pressure decreased by 13.28%, which can reduce the pumping power of the cooling water in the channel, and the consumption of energy of the EVs.