Thermal performance of rectangular serpentine mini-channel cooling system on lithium battery

Abstract

The energy crisis and environmental damage urgently require clean and efficient energy conversion to replace the traditional petroleum fuel combustion. Lithium battery is an efficient energy storage and conversion system, and its use can effectively reduce the use of fossil fuels. However, its extremely sensitive temperature characteristics seriously limit its performance. Therefore, it is of great significance to design an efficient battery cooling system to protect the performance of lithium batteries. In this paper, a novel serpentine mini-channel cooling management system for lithium battery is studied with experiment research and numerical simulation. The simulation results and experimental data are in good agreement. The difference between the two results is roughly within 1 K. The maximum battery temperature increases with the increase of the discharge current. The cooling system has high efficiency and made battery temperature drop rapidly. When the Reynolds number is 200, the maximum battery temperature decreases from 327.4 K to 306.9 K at 30 A discharge current, from 313.5 K to 300.4 K at 15 A discharge current, and from 306.1 K to 298.7 K at 7.5 A discharge current. The maximum battery temperature drops rapidly when the Reynolds number ranges from 0 to 40 and decreases slowly from 40 to 200. Whereas, the Reynolds number has little effect on the battery temperature for Re is over 200. The low inlet temperature and high aspect ratio are beneficial for heat dissipation. The cooling effect of ethylene glycol is stronger than that of water and ammonia. When the Reynolds number is 200, ethylene glycol, water and ammonia reduce the temperature by 21.6 K, 20.6 K and 14.4 K respectively. The results provide a good guidance for the application and further study of serpentine mini-channel in lithium battery.