Abstract
Effective thermal management plays a critical role in ensuring peak performance for heavy-duty electric vehicle battery packs and high-performance electronics. To address the need for effective heat dissipation, liquid coolants are employed, which exhibit higher heat transfer performance compared to traditional air-cooled systems. However, the associated increased viscosity of such liquid coolants and constricted flow path lead to reduced mixing, thereby deteriorating the thermal performance of the system. Here, we explore the potential of utilizing viscoelastic liquid coolants for enhancing heat transfer from the heated walls of a constricted flow path with obstacles, modeling features of battery coolant channels. At low-Reynolds number regime, viscoelastic fluids exhibit instabilities which can disrupt the thermal boundary layer and enhance fluid mixing in the domain, thereby facilitating wall heat transfer. We employed computational fluid dynamics simulations, validated with experimental observations, to explore the effect of the flow geometry, Weissenberg number, solvent viscosity ratio, polymer extensibility, and Reynolds number on thermal performance. Our study indicates that the heat transfer is enhanced with flow instabilities in viscoelastic fluids, which can be generated exclusively in the flow channel with obstacles by increasing the Weissenberg number, reducing the solvent viscosity ratio, increasing the polymer extensibility, and increasing the Reynolds number. The enhancement in the heat transfer can exclusively be attributed to the elastic properties of the fluid in contrast to the inelastic shear-thinning fluids exhibiting no instability. The insights from the study can play an important role in the development of advanced, high-efficiency battery cooling systems, combining surface engineering and synthesis of optimized heat transfer liquids.
Published Version
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