Liquid-cooled structure design and heat dissipation characteristics analysis of cross-flow channels for lithium batteries

Abstract

A detailed three-dimensional thermal model is developed to examine the thermal behaviour of a lithium-ion battery. This model is a cross-flow liquid cooling model, which can make the heat dissipation of lithium-ion battery pack achieve higher safety. Two kinds of fluids are used for cooling, and the polynomial fitting function is used as the heat source term of lithium battery pack. The battery temperature distribution under the conditions of different Reynolds numbers, different numbers of micro-channel and different micro-channel radii are studied for this model. The simulation results show that the maximum battery temperature is 295.84 K, the minimum battery temperature is 293.14 K, and the maximum temperature difference of the battery pack is 2.7 K. The maximum temperature and temperature difference of the battery under the model are in line with the reasonable operating temperature range of lithium-ion battery pack. The maximum temperature of battery pack decreases with the increase of Reynolds number, but the effect of Reynolds number on heat dissipation of lithium-ion battery pack has a critical value. As the number of micro-channels increases, the maximum temperature of the battery string decreases. However, when the number of micro-channels increases to a certain value, the maximum temperature of the battery pack decreases slowly. The maximum temperature of the battery pack does not decrease monotonically as the radius of the micro-channel increases. Orthogonal analysis results show that the Reynolds number has the greatest influence on the cooling effect of the model, followed by the size of the micro-channel radius, and the number of micro-channels has the least influence. The optimized liquid cooling model can effectively reduce the maximum temperature of lithium-ion battery in theory, and the maximum temperature of lithium-ion battery decreases by 26.24 K in comparison with that of single battery at 2C discharge rate. The reliability of the cross-flow channel model is proved by numerical analysis, and it is also proved that the cross-flow channel has an equilibrium point between the perturbation gain and the flow retarding effect. The heat dissipation effect of lithium- ion battery pack is correlated with the number and radius of micro-channels, but not a single positive correlation. Reasonably increasing the number and size of micro-channels can effectively enhance the heat dissipation effect of battery pack.