Design and optimization of an integrated liquid cooling thermal management system with a diamond-type channel

The ability of the battery thermal management system (BTMS) to dissipate heat significantly impacts the operating performance and the service life of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Designing an effective and efficient BTMS is difficult due to its multiple parameters. Therefore, an integrated liquid cooling plate with a diamond-type flow channel was designed in this paper. Firstly, two arrangement plans (plan 1 and plan 2) were designed to investigate the effect of coolant flow direction in the channel on the cooling performance of BTMS. The simulation results indicated that plan 2 (the shorter main flow channel serves as the outlet) could lead to better cooling performance. The maximum temperature (T_max) and the volume-average temperature (VAT) of the battery pack for plan 2 were 313.33 K and 308.79 K, respectively. Then, the surrogate model was developed by the Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS), and the six parameters (F, H_c, W_b, W_L, W_S, and W_IO) of the BTMS were optimized using the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA). The T_max of the battery pack decreased from 313.33 K to 308.98 K, and the VAT decreased from 308.79 K to 306.06 K. The average pressure drop (Δp) between the inlets and outlets decreased significantly, from 1708.30 Pa to 520.10 Pa, up to 1188.20 Pa. It demonstrated that the BTMS achieved a balance between thermal performance and power consumption after optimization.