Parametric Investigations on a Prismatic Lithium- Ion Battery Pack with a Mini-Channel Cold Plate for Effective Thermal Management

Lithium-ion batteries have become a prominent ultimate choice due to their inherent advantages. However, their performance is susceptible, especially at high temperatures arising out of fast charging and high discharge rates. A good battery thermal management to overcome thermal runaway due to the temperature sensitivity of power batteries. Liquid cooling with water as a coolant has emerged as an integral part of electric vehicle-related research. For effective liquid cooling, the use of min-channel cold plates is explored but with complicated circuits of liquid flow. Present work deals with, two simple designs- Design 1 and Design 2, and their efficacy has been tried out by varying numbers of channels, cross- section of channels, profile of channels and inlet mass flow rate of coolant under 3C and 5C discharge rates for a prismatic Lithium-ion battery pack. A systematic and extensive simulations are performed, using ANSYS FLUENT 2023 R1, maintaining uniform initial boundary conditions of ambient pressure and temperature, 300 K. To begin with,simulations are performed on a single cell and extended up to battery pack with and without mini-channel cold plate. It is observed that Design 2 yielded better thermal performance in terms of lowest peak temperature and lowest temperature difference across the cells with marginally high-pressure drop for zig-zag profile compared to straight channels with a temperature difference of about 12 K. The simulation study well predicted the thermal behavior of single cell, mini-channel cold plate and battery pack with two different designs.