Numerical Analysis of Cooling Plates with Different Structures for Electric Vehicle Battery Thermal Management Systems

The performance of lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) is greatly affected by temperature. Hence, an efficient battery thermal management system (BTMS) is needed to ensure the safety of batteries and prolong the cycle life. In order to find a more efficient type of cooling plate for the rectangular batteries, the three-dimensional models of four common cooling plates with different internal structures are established. After a series of computational fluid dynamic simulations and comparisons, the most optimum structure of the cooling plate is obtained. Subsequently, the effect of different mass flow rates is investigated among the different cooling plates. It indicates that the cooling plate with convex structure has a better cooling performance than the other three, and the heat transfer performance of various cooling plates changes a lot with the increasing of mass flow rate. The convex structured cooling plate could be applied for optimizing the performance for electric vehicles.