Optimization study of air-cooled stagger-arranged battery pack with reverse-layered airflow

For low cost and environmental adaptability, the air-cooling system has been widely used as the thermal management system and is being discussed in more and more studies. In this paper, a three-dimensional model of a stagger-arranged IFR-38120 battery pack was firstly established to investigate the effects of different cell-to-cell interval (d), two-roll interval (r), and cell-to-wall interval (s) on battery cooling performance. Then, the reverse-layered stagger-arranged battery pack configuration was optimized by the Design of Experiment method. The simulation results demonstrated that compared to the original configuration, the maximum temperature (T_max) and maximum temperature difference (ΔT_max) of the optimized reverse-layered stagger-arranged configuration dropped to 310.46 K and 6.60 K, respectively. The corresponding pressure resistance (Δp) and the space utilization factor (α) were 195.66 Pa and 0.484, respectively. Additionally, a 5 × 5 spoiler was added to the optimized model to improve temperature distribution further. Temperature uniformity was further improved with the spoilers on each side, and the ΔT_max of the battery pack decreased by 1.85 K compared with the one without a spoiler.