Novel battery thermal management system with different shapes of pin fins

Abstract

Battery thermal management systems (BTMS) with favorable working performance are essential for lithium-ion battery inside the electrical vehicles. In this research, a novel BTMS is proposed by introducing vertically and horizontally arranged square pin fins (SPFs), circular pin fins (CPFs), and ellipse pin fins (EPFs) into the cold plate. The overall cooling performance (efficiency index: EI) of the proposed BTMS is evaluated numerically, considering both heat transfer and pressure loss. It is found that BTMS with SPFs always achieve the best cooling performance but is penalized with a higher pressure loss. EPFs-arranged BTMS can achieve the lowest pressure loss due to the excellent streamlined structure, but its cooling performance is also the lowest among these three different pin fin shapes. Considering both heat transfer and pressure loss, CPFs can be the best choice for BTMS when pin fins are vertically arranged, due to the favorable cooling performance and acceptable pressure loss caused by CPFs. However, the pressure loss is larger for all horizontally arranged pin fins. Considering both heat transfer and friction factor, SPFs are recommended for BTMS because of the greater enhancement of heat transfer.