A manifold channel liquid cooling system with low-cost and high temperature uniformity for lithium-ion battery pack thermal management

A liquid-cooled battery thermal management systems (BTMS) has been widely employed as an effective approach for electronic vehicles to ensure battery safety. However, the common linear flow channel structure induces a serious non-uniform temperature distribution. In this study, the novel taper-type manifold channel heat sink with multi-channel passes is proposed to improve battery temperature uniformity and reduce power consumption of BTMSs. The maximum battery temperature and temperature difference, temperature maldistribution parameter and power consumption performance of eight different designs are analyzed and compared. Moreover, the effectiveness of delayed cooling strategy on the temperature uniformity based on liquid-cooled system were analyzed as well. The results show that adopting the taper-type manifold structure can improve the cooling performance of BTMSs, while increasing the number of channel passes improves the thermal performance at the cost of increased power consumption. The taper-type manifold structure with three channel passes has the best cooling performance, in which its power consumption is reduced by 86.3% compared to the base case within the battery temperature and temperature difference limits. Furthermore, delayed cooling scheme is not found to be a good strategy for BTM since it will accumulate a large temperature difference in a very short period when the coolant starts to turn on. These results are of great significance to the design of advanced liquid cooling BTMS.