Performance analysis and optimization of a novel cooling plate with non-uniform pin-fins for lithium battery thermal management

Abstract

• Cold plate with varying-diameter pin-fins is proposed for battery thermal management. • Heat generation rate of lithium battery cell is evaluated with experiment method. • The impacts of varying diameter pin-fins on cold plate performance are studied. • Optimization is performed to search the optimal varying pattern of pin–fin diameter. • The pump work, weight and T sd are reduced by 29.8%, 29.0% and 17.4%, respectively. The structure of the flow path has significant impacts on the performance of cooling plate for battery thermal management. This paper aims at improving the temperature uniformity, power consumption and weight performance by proposing a novel cooling plate with non-uniform pin-fins. Experimental method is employed to obtain the battery heat generation rate at 5C discharge rate. Then the performances of cooling plates with fixed diameter and varying diameter pin-fins are evaluated based on CFD method. To explore the best varying pattern of the pin–fin diameter, multi-objective optimization with multi-island genetic algorithm considering the maximum temperature (T m ), temperature standard deviation (T sd ), power consumption (P) and mass of cooling plate (m) is performed. Then numerical simulation is employed to compare the optimized design with the traditional parallel mini-channel design. The result shows that optimized design with non-uniform pin fins can reduce the power consumption, weight and temperature standard deviation by 29.84%, 29.00% and 17.43%, respectively. The maximum temperature is also reduced by 1.04 °C.