Thermal performance of cylindrical lithium-ion battery thermal management system integrated with mini-channel liquid cooling and air cooling

Abstract

To overcome the temperature increase of battery along the flow direction of coolant in cylindrical lithium-ion battery module, a composite thermal management system integrated with mini-channel liquid cooling and air cooling is proposed. The computational fluid dynamics model of battery module is validated using the experiment results to investigate the effects of inlet flow rate of water, amount of cooling tube and mini-channel, tube space, water flow direction, and spacer combination on the thermal performance of mini-channel liquid cooling at 4 C discharge rate. When air cooling is integrated with mini-channel liquid cooling, the corresponding thermal performance of the composite system is analyzed. The results show that the maximum temperature and temperature difference decrease with an increase in the water inlet flow rate with a significant rise of power consumption. When the water inlet flow rate is 3 × 10−4 kg⋅s−1, the increasing amount of the cooling tube and mini-channel could slightly improve the cooling performance. If the cases with suitable values of the tube space, flow direction, and spacer combination are adopted, the temperature difference would remain within 4.13 K, and the maximum temperature decreases to 304.98 K. Moreover, the extra air cooling at the velocity of 4 m⋅s−1 could reduce the maximum temperature and the temperature difference of battery module dropped by 2.22 K and 2.04 K at 80% DOD. More importantly, the maximum temperature difference could be manipulated within 5.0 K when the fan was automatically controlled according to the temperature of the battery module.