Experimental and numerical investigation on efficient optimization of battery thermal management systems

Air-cooled battery thermal management systems are widely used in electric vehicles for cooling of battery pack. Design of air-cooled systems is in urgent need to enable the temperature and temperature difference in battery packs to locate within a reasonable range. In this work, a novel optimization method is proposed for efficient design of parallel air-cooled battery thermal management systems. The optimization method is developed by introducing simplified calculation models (heat transfer model and flow resistance network model) and setting identical average temperature of battery cells. This method obtains the optimized structural parameters by solving the simplified models, which is time-saving. Design of the parallel channel widths for different air-cooled systems is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the developed method. Results indicate that the temperature difference among batteries decreases by more than 72% with the maximum temperature decreased as well after the optimization. The optimized systems exhibit better heat dissipating performance than those using the previous optimization methods. Furthermore, experiments are carried out to examine the performance of the optimized system. The proposed optimization method shows great potential for efficient structural design of parallel air-cooled BTMSs.