Optimization investigation on the liquid cooling heat dissipation structure for the lithium-ion battery package in electric vehicles

Abstract

The requirements of cooling and weight reduction for lithium-ion battery packages in electric vehicles are increasingly important. In this paper, a liquid cooling heat dissipation structure is designed and optimized. First of all, the effects of tube diameter, spacing, thickness and layout of the cooling plate on the heat dissipation of the battery package are investigated by using computational fluid dynamics. Afterwards, based on the optimal results of the single factor analysis, an orthogonal table with four factors and three levels are constructed to perform a single-objective optimization, where the minimization of the maximum temperature is the optimization object. Meanwhile, an experiment is carried out to verify the accuracy of the simulation model. In order to further reduce the mass of the cooling plate, a multi-objective optimization is performed, where the minimization of the maximum temperature and the mass are the optimization objects. The maximum temperature is increased by 10.9% in the multi-objective optimization when compared with that in the single objective optimization. However, the mass of the cooling plate in the multi-objective optimization can drop by 82.4%.