A Comprehensive CFD-Driven Approach to Battery Thermal Modeling and Cooling System Optimization

With the continued expansion of electric mobility, liquid-cooled thermal management systems have become indispensable for ensuring the performance, durability, and safety of automotive battery packs. This work presents a novel cooling-plate design that integrates offset strip-fin turbulators to enhance convective heat transfer between lithium-ion cells and the circulating coolant. A comprehensive multi-region CFD model of the full battery pack is developed, incorporating an implicit lumped-parameter representation of cell heat generation. The numerical predictions are validated against dedicated experimental measurements available in the literature. Subsequently, a parametric study is conducted in which the number of hydraulic sub-modules and the inlet/outlet configurations are systematically varied to generate all feasible design permutations. The resulting configurations are compared to assess thermal performance and to quantify the benefits—as well as the potential penalties—introduced by the turbulators relative to the experimentally validated baseline.