Numerical and experimental study on efficient optimization of variable cross-section battery thermal management systems using an improved flow resistance network model

Abstract

Air-cooled systems are widely used for cooling of battery packs in electric vehicles. Optimization method combined with the flow resistance network (FRN) model is effective for system design. However, the local pressure loss of divergence and convergence ducts in the traditional FRN model is ignored, leading to large error when applying the model in systems with variable cross-section channels. In this study, the local loss coefficients of the contractive and diffusive channels are derived and the improved FRN model is developed for velocity calculation of variable cross-section air-cooled systems. The improved model is verified using computational fluid dynamics method. Based on the improved FRN model, the cross-section width distribution of the divergence duct is calculated from the given flow rate distribution. The shape of the divergence deflector is optimized by adjusting the flow rate distribution and using the improved model. The results indicate that the temperature difference of the battery cells decreases by more than 84% after the optimization, with the maximum temperature decreasing by more than 3.8 K. Furthermore, the optimized system performs better than those in the previous studies. Also, experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the developed optimization method based on the improved FRN model.