Numerical investigation and parameter optimization on a rib-grooved liquid-cooled plate for lithium battery thermal management system

Abstract

To increase the effectiveness of liquid-cooled battery thermal management systems (BTMS) in electric vehicles, a unique liquid-cooled plate with a discrete, inclined, and alternating arrangement of ribs and grooves inside the plate was invented during this study. A numerical study was carried on to analyze the thermal performance between this rib-grooved liquid-cooled plate and a conventional straight-channel one. Firstly, a battery module's 1D/3D electrochemical-thermal coupled model was constructed to analyze the thermal performance in the case of actual electrochemical heat production. Then numerical results were obtained by solving this coupled model with different plates. The results indicated that ribs effectively equalize the flows between different channels and multiple longitudinal swirl flows are formed due to grooves, which improves the liquid-cooled system's temperature control performance with a small increase in pressure drop. The maximum battery temperature is 0.74 °C lower, the temperature standard deviation of the contact surface is 0.18 °C lower, and the pressure drop is 55.37 Pa higher in the BTMS with the rib-grooved liquid-cooled plate than it is in the conventional one. After that, an orthogonal design of experiments was used to investigate the effect of four features, including rib-groove tilt angle, column spacing, row spacing, and rib-groove length, on the thermal performance and energy consumption of the battery module. The optimum structure of the rib-grooved liquid-cooled plate is obtained through range analysis: the rib-groove inclination angle is 45°, the row spacing is 13.5 mm, the column spacing is 11.5 mm, and the rib-groove length is 9 mm. This research on the rib-grooved liquid-cooled plate offers a fresh concept that considerably enhances its capacity to regulate the temperature of the liquid-cooled BTMS.