Thermal management of lithium-ion batteries by novel designs of wavy cold plates: Performance comparison

Abstract

Hybrid cooling combined with simple designed wavy structure cold plates provides a prominent solution for overheating and undercooling of the lithium-ion batteries. Air passed through improper structure causes uneven cell temperature that leads to thermal runaway. Hence in this study we provided experimental reference for the uniform cell temperature distribution in battery pack with combined wavy cold plate structure and hybrid cooling strategy. Four thermal models, namely core model, optimised model, extended fin model, and ripple model were proposed. Average cell temperature T¯, cell maximum temperature Tmax, thermal gradient ∆T, flow direction and uniform temperature distribution throughout the battery pack were evaluated and compared. Experiments were conducted at 40 °C, to represent the realistic conditions of extreme weather conditions. The results indicate that replacing conventional structure with novel wavy cold plate designs that could improve cell temperatures uniformity and also maximum cell temperatures were observed <50 °C in every cycle of 1C, 1.5C and 2C. Furthermore, battery warm-up experiments were conducted at an extreme low temperature of 4 °C. Most important feature in this research was replacing a complexity of BTMS structure with simple design and improve the application of wavy cooling plate BTMS in extreme ambient conditions. Moreover optimised and core model wavy plate exhibits 28 % and 26.7 % of improved cooling performance and warm up performance was improved upto 33.3%.