Investigation on Battery Thermal Management Based on Enhanced Heat Transfer Disturbance Structure within Mini-Channel Liquid Cooling Plate

Abstract

The battery thermal management system plays an important role in the safe operation of a lithium-ion battery system. In this paper, a novel liquid cooling plate with mini-channels is proposed and is improved with disturbance structures. First, an accurate battery heat generation model is established and verified by experiments. The error is less than 4%, indicating the heat generation power is reliable. Then, five designs are proposed first to determine the suitable number of disturbance structures, and plan 3 with five disturbance structures shows a satisfying performance in heat dissipation and flow field. Moreover, four layout plans are proposed, namely uniform, interlaced, thinning, and gradually denser distribution. Results show that plan 5 (uniform) achieves the best performance: the maximum average temperature is 36.33 °C and the maximum average temperature difference is 0.16 °C. At last, the orthogonal experiment and range analysis are adopted to optimize the structure parameters. Results show that the best combination is space between adjacent disturbance structures d1 = 20 mm, length d2 = 5 mm, width d3 = 1.5 mm, and tilt angle β = 60°.