Thermal Design and Numerical Investigation of Cold Plate for Active Water Cooling for High-Energy Density Lithium-Ion Battery Module

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of the temperature and velocity distributions inside cold plates mounted on a lithium-ion battery identical mimic battery module using the NMC 18,650 cell and a lumped numerical method for the conjugate heat transfer battery model. The present study evaluates water cooling techniques for a cold plate at constant charge conditions over the battery modules. The numerical model is created using commercial Ansys software to examine heat transport properties across battery module surface temperature under various charge rates of 1C, 2C, and 3C at a generic ambient operating temperature of 24 °C. A laminar flow inlet is taken for water with 0.5, 1, and 3 m/s input flow rate. A multi-objective optimization strategy is proposed for which increasing input flow rate (Reynolds number) is subjected to increase heat transfer coefficient (Nusselt number) of battery module which drastically reduces surface temperature. Strong correlations suggest that by increasing flow rate hat transfer characteristics also increases, furthermore recommendations are aligned with the thermal design view which suggests for an active cooling strategy using cold plate at the location near to outlet port, there is more amount of hotspot creation takes places because water subjected to absorb the maximum amount of latent heat at the inlet port; hence when it moves along outlet port, it had already given up its capacity of cooling effectiveness.