Performance analysis of liquid cooling battery thermal management system in different cooling cases

Abstract

An efficient battery thermal management system can control the temperature of the battery module to improve overall performance. In this paper, different kinds of liquid cooling thermal management systems were designed for a battery module consisting of 12 prismatic LiFePO4 batteries. This paper used the computational fluid dynamics simulation as the main research tool and proposed a parameter to evaluate the performance of the cold plate in terms of both heat transfer and flow resistance, then the effect of cooling surface, number of inlets, and direction of coolant flow on the cooling effect were studied. It was found that the maximum temperature of the battery module could be controlled at 303.6 K and the maximum temperature difference between the batteries at 2.3 K when the cooling surface was Face A which was between the batteries, the number of coolant inlets was 3, and the coolant flow direction was arranged alternately. Finally, the study was conducted for different mass flow rates of a single inlet and different charging rates. It was found that the overall performance is optimal when the mass flow rate of a single inlet is 1.2 g/s and the designed thermal management system can meet the temperature requirement (the maximum temperature of the battery module is 313 K and the maximum temperature difference between the batteries is 5 K) of the battery module with charging rate below 3C.