Abstract
Average temperature and temperature uniformity in a battery cell are the important criteria of the thermal management of the battery pack for hybrid electric vehicles and electric vehicles (HEVs and EVs) because high power with large size cell is used for the battery pack. Thus, liquid cooling system is generally applied for the HEV/EV battery pack. The liquid cooling system is made of multiple cooling plates with coolant flow paths. The cooling plates are inserted between the battery cells to reject the heat from batteries to coolant. In this study, the cooling plate with U-shaped coolant flow paths is considered to evaluate the effects of coolant flow condition on the cooling performance of the system. The counter flow and parallel flow set up is compared and the effect of flow rate is evaluated using CFD tool (FLUENT). The number of counter-flows and flow rate are changed and the effect on the cooling performance including average temperature, differential temperature, and standard deviation of temperature are investigated. The results show that the parallel flow has better cooling performance compared with counter flow and it is also found that the coolant flow rate should be chosen with the consideration of trade-off between the cooling performance and pressure drop.
