A new approach for battery thermal management system design based on Grey Relational Analysis and Latin Hypercube Sampling

A liquid cooling system is an effective type of battery cooling system on which many studies are presented nowadays. In this research, the effects of the mass flow rate and number of channels on the maximum temperature and pressure drop are investigated for multi-channel serpentine cooling plates. A new approach with LHS and GRA is used to obtain the optimum ranges of design parameters to minimize the pressure drop, maximum temperature and to maximize the convective heat transfer coefficient. In this study, the values of the parameters for the numerical modeling are obtained by the experiments. The width and height of the serpentine channel and mass flow rate are chosen as input parameters and the pressure drop, convective heat transfer coefficient and maximum temperature are selected as output parameters. Comparing with the base design, the optimized design provided up to 40.3% decrease in the pressure drop with a penalty of 11.3% decrease in the convective heat transfer coefficient with a slight decrease in the maximum temperature. The proposed approach can be used to design better cooling plates to keep the batteries in safe temperature ranges and to reduce the power consumption by optimizing the pressure drop and maximum temperature values.