Numerical investigation of a novel cold plate design with uniform circular hollow fins for battery thermal management systems

Abstract

Cooling plate design plays an important role in an efficient battery thermal management system (BTMS). An effective cooling plate should have a low cost, lightweight, and dissipate heat with minimal pressure drop. Therefore, in this study a new lightweight cold plate design with circular hollow fins is proposed and heat generation is validated by experiment. A 3D numerical model is developed and the performance of the cold plate is evaluated by maximum temperature, temperature standard deviation, mass and power consumption. Firstly, the effects of structural parameters like fins diameter, the distance between hollow fins, cold plate thickness, and flow rate on the battery maximum temperature, temperature standard deviation, and pressure drop are studied. The results indicate that increasing the size of the hollow fins reduces the cold plate mass and leads to lower battery temperature, whereas the pressure drop increases. When the distance between hollow fins decreases more heat is taken away by the coolant. Furthermore, the performance of the optimized cooling structure is compared in terms of maximum temperature, temperature difference, mass of cooling plate, and power consumption with conventional liquid cooling structures under the same operating conditions. The results indicate that the optimized cooling structure can reduce the maximum temperature, temperature difference, mass of the cooling plate and power consumption by 6%, 29%, 55.2%, and 85.9%, respectively.