Enhanced Cooling Strategy With a Heat‐Carrying Plate for Thermal Management of Pouch‐Type Battery Pack

ABSTRACT With the growing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) driven by environmental concerns, an effective and efficient battery thermal management system (BTMS) is necessary. For effective BTMS, the design plays a critical role which decides the thermal behavior of a battery pack. This study presents two design structures (D1 and D2) for pouch‐type battery thermal management systems. The critical design aspects of D1 and D2 differ in how the heat carrier plate is designed and arranged within the battery pack. This plate plays an important role in transferring heat from the cell to the cooling medium through the thermal pad. The influence of parameters such as charging/discharging rate (C‐rate), ambient temperature ( T amb ), and convective coefficient ( h ) on the battery pack's maximum temperature and the maximum temperature difference (∆ T max ) is evaluated using the Newman, Tiedemann, Gu, and Kim (NTGK) battery model. The Taguchi method is used to minimize the number of simulations. Also, the change of input parameters' contribution to the thermal behavior of the battery pack due to design change is studied. It is observed that the D2 battery pack structure is more effective in maintaining lower temperatures and better temperature uniformity compared to D1. ∆ T max for D1 is observed as 5.33 K, while D2 is 4.52 K, with the T amb , C‐rate, and convective heat transfer coefficient as 318 K, 9, and 5 W/m 2 K. Also, up to 3 C‐rate, D1 provides nearly similar thermal performance as D2, hence D1 can be preferred over D2 due to its compact size. However, D2 should be preferred for higher C‐rates as the difference in thermal performance increases significantly.