Investigation on the performance enhancement of baffled cold plate based battery thermal management system

Abstract

Liquid cooling is an efficient thermal management method. In response to the lightweight and compact demand faced by the development of battery thermal management system (BTMS), a thin baffled cold plate for liquid-based BTMS was designed. The accuracy of the simulation was verified through experiment. The influence of structure parameters on the heat transfer performance was explored. A structure optimization method called local connection was proposed for heat transfer enhancement. The baffled cold plate was applied to BTMS with battery at 3 C discharge rate to explore the effect on the temperature control performance. The results show that local connection optimization can simultaneously improve the comprehensive heat transfer performance and temperature uniformity of the baffled cold plate, and the maximum increase can be 24.71% and 6.71% respectively compared to Case 0–4-L75. The effect of the improvement is affected by the spacing, position, number of the local slits and the distance between the local slit and the channel corner apex. Local connection optimization can reduce the power consumption of baffled cold plate based BTMS while ensuring the temperature control performance, which can save energy.