Design improvement on cooling plates/tube of BTMS of Electric vehicles by changing internal structure and coolant mass flow rate

The lithium-ion battery is most common types of batteries in modern electric vehicles. During operation of vehicle and charging of batteries, temperature of the battery cells increases. From any battery, its temperature needs to be controlled and maintained within a defined limit to achieve the maximum efficiency. Considering the overall thermal effect on the battery, a battery cooling system is of great importance in electric vehicles to maintain the temperature of the battery cells inside the battery pack. There are different types of systems for battery cooling but water cooled systems are very popular. It uses mixture of water and ethylene glycol to absorb heat from the battery cells. The coolant circulates through components that surround the cells, such as tubes and cold plates surrounded by cells. The paper involves the study of internal structure of tubes on the temperature variation of battery cell. It involves by changing the design of internal structure of the tube how the battery cell temperature as well as heat transfer will change is studied. The temperature of battery packs to be maintained within range for better performance of battery. This is done by changing the design of coolant channel as well as mass flow rate of coolant inside the channel of tubes. CFD analysis is carried out on various designs and operating parameters. Heat source is defined on the cells as input thermal load and find out the temperatures distribution/variation on the battery cells. From the analysis, total heat transfer & temperature distribution on the battery cell on different parameters is predicted and compared the result. Since the coolant flow rate is also varied, the pressure drop variation inside the tubes also studied. By changing the design of coolant channels, the improvement on the temperature on batteries is compared for different mass flow rate. The present paper describes the optimization of the coolant plate by changing the design of coolant plate and numerical simulation conducted for various design. Hyper mesh is used for the meshing and surface cleanup .STAR CCM+ is used for CFD analysis and post processing of the results. Abbreviations: CFD -Computational fluid dynamics, ,CATIA- Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application