Investigation and optimization on cooling performance of serial-parallel mini-channel structure for liquid-cooled soft pack batteries

Abstract

This article proposes a liquid-cooled battery thermal management system based on a serial-parallel mini-channel cold plate to solve the problem of severe heat generation during high-rate battery discharge. The numerical simulation method was used to investigate the cooling effects of the bottom margin of the inlet flow channel length (L) and flow channel width (W). The results showed that increasing the L will reduce the standard deviation of the battery pack temperature, but the maximum temperature and maximum temperature difference will decrease at first and then increase. Meanwhile, the increase of the W will reduce the average temperature of the battery pack, but the maximum temperature and maximum temperature difference will increase slightly after the W exceeds a certain value. In addition, the response surface methodology (RSM) was used to analyze the interactive effects of different parameters on the performance of the cooling system and optimize the structural parameters. The RSM predicted results revealed that compared with the original model, the maximum temperature difference and pressure drop of the coolant fell by 15.5 and 34.8%, respectively, which significantly improved the performance of the cooling system.