A Comprehensive Parametric Study of Minichannel Based Liquid Cooling of Li-Ion Battery Pack

Li-ion based energy storage devices have highly temperature dependent characteristics such as performance, life-cycle, efficiency and safety. Large temperature gradient within a cell results in thermal stresses and nonuniform current density leading to accelerated degradation. This adversely affects the life cycle of the cell due to capacity and power fade. There are similar issues due to large temperature variation within a battery pack. Operation of Li-ion cell outside the desirable temperature range also leads to lower efficiency, degradation and safety related issues. Different thermal management approaches have been proposed and demonstrated in past. The present work focuses specifically on minichannel based liquid cooling for conducting a parametric study. Minichannels have been found effective in various thermal management applications due to their simple construction and high convective heat transfer. In past, minichannels have been proposed and used in battery thermal management. However, designing of such systems has been somewhat arbitrary without considering various factors and trade-offs involved. There is a lack of rigorous studies for determining various parameters related to thermal management system that would result in adequate thermal management in a cost-effective manner. In the present work, a comprehensive parametric study has been carried out on the minichannel based liquid cooling for thermal management of Li-ion battery pack. A simplified computationally efficient numerical simulation-based approach has been used to conduct parametric study for optimizing the design and operating parameters of the thermal management system.