A simple cooling structure with precisely-tailored liquid cooling plate for thermal management of large battery module

The liquid cooling (LC) systems for large battery modules commonly involve many LC plates (LCPs) or other cooling components for achieving a high cooling efficiency. This leads to a greatly reduced energy density of the battery modules, and raises the cost of the cooling system. To overcome the contradiction between the cooling performance and structure complexity, a simple yet effective LC structure comprising only two LCPs and lightweight Al-plates, is proposed herein by precisely designing the channel shape of the LCPs and systematically optimizing the cooling structure. Based on the finite element method, a three-dimension coupled with multiphysics model is applied for the battery module during the discharge process. The numerical simulation results show that the well-defined structure of the LCPs, i.e., two inlet channels merging into one outlet channel covering all the batteries, can effectively relieve the “edge-overcooling” phenomenon existing in such simple structures. Combining with optimizing the inlet velocity and Al-plate thickness, the cooling performance can be further enhanced to a comparable level with that of the traditional complex structures. For example, with an Al-plate thickness of 4 mm and an inlet velocity of 0.275 m∙s−1, the maximum temperature and maximum temperature difference of the battery module can be controlled below 31.80 and 3.70 °C, respectively. As highlighted here, apart from the excellent cooling performance, such a simple cooling structure only accounts for 16.4 wt% of the module weight, much lower than those in previous investigations, and can be expanded more easily to larger-scaled battery modules with diversified specifications, particularly those simultaneously targeting lightweight and high cooling performance.