Cooling efficiency improvement of air-cooled battery thermal management system through designing the flow pattern

Air-cooled battery thermal management system (BTMS) is one of the most commonly used solutions to maintain the appropriate temperature of battery pack in electric vehicle. In the present study, the cooling efficiency of the air-cooled BTMS is improved through designing the flow pattern of the system. The BTMSs with various positions of the inlet region and the outlet region are considered. The performances of the systems are evaluated using the numerical method, the effectiveness of which is validated by experiment. The results show that the symmetrical BTMS with the inlet and outlet located on the middle of the plenums achieves high cooling efficiency. Subsequently, an optimization strategy is proposed to optimize the positions of the inlet region and the outlet region for cooling efficiency improvement of the system. It is found that the optimized BTMS has better cooling performance than other BTMSs. Compared to the typical BTMS with Z-type flow, the maximum temperature and the maximum cell temperature difference of the optimized BTMS are reduced by 4.5 K and 7.7 K, respectively. Compared to the symmetrical system, the maximum cell temperature difference of the optimized BTMS is reduced by 1.7 K with the power consumption decreased by 12%. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.