Numerical Studies on Topological Design of Cold Plate for a Cell-to-Pack Battery System

Abstract

Topology optimization (TO) method is adopted to obtain cold plates that resemble plant root-like channel, intended to boost the thermal management efficiency of a cell-to-pack system. Simulation results reveal that increasing the weighting factor leads to more and narrower branching channels, thereby enhancing the heat exchange capacity of the cold plate at the expense of the flow properties. Among the configurations, the cold plate with a weighting factor of 0.5 and a single inlet and dual outlets (TCP-2) achieves the best trade-off between various performances. To explore the influence of inlet pressure, inlet temperature, and charge rate, the TCP-2 is evaluated using performance evaluation criteria (PEC). Also, comparisons are conducted with conventional rectangular channel cold plate (RCP), serpentine channel cold plate (SCP) and pin-fin channel cold plate (PCP). It is found that the TCP-2 outperforms the conventional cold plates in terms of overall performance under all test conditions. And this advantage is even more pronounced at higher inlet temperatures and charging rates. The percentage differences in PEC relative to TCP-2 reach 14.5% for RCP, 85.9% for SCP and 57.9% for PCP at a charge rate of 2C. These findings fully demonstrate the feasibility of the TO approach in the channel design of module-level cold plates.

Keywords: lithium-ion battery, Topology optimization, Cold plate, Performance evaluation