Experimental and numerical investigations on the thermal performance of three different cold plates designed for the electrical vehicle battery module

Abstract

The thermal performance of battery modules has a crucial role in the performance, safety, and lifetime of battery cells. Commonly, battery models are validated through experimental data to ensure the correctness of model behavior; however, the influences of experimental setups are often not considered in the laboratory environment, especially for prismatic cells such as lithium titanate oxide (LTO) battery cells used in electric vehicles. For this purpose, both experimental and numerical studies of the thermal performance of the battery module consisting of LTO cells was investigated using different cold plates used in electrical and hybrid vehicles. Three different discharging rates were applied to the battery module to obtain comparative results of the cooling performance. In the numerical simulations, heat generation models are typically used to observe the thermal behavior of the battery module; however, in the numerical study, dual potential multi-scale multi-domain (MSMD) battery models were used, with transient flow and heat transfer calculations performed. The numerical results were in good agreement with the experimental data. A new high-performance cold plate was developed for the thermal management of LTO battery cells. In comparison with the other two cold plate configurations, the proposed cold plate configuration dropped the maximum temperature up to 45% for the same operating conditions.