A novel liquid cooling plate concept for thermal management of lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles

In this paper, an innovative liquid cooling plate (LCP) embedded with phase change material (PCM) is designed for electric vehicle (EV) battery thermal management. The proposed cooling plate is named “hybrid cooling plate” as it takes advantage of both active (liquid) and passive (PCM) cooling methods. The hybrid LCP is 36% lighter than a volumetrically equivalent traditional aluminum LCP, and in addition to the cooling capability, it provides a heating solution to slow the temperature loss of the batteries during the cold stop. The thermal behavior of the hybrid LCP for two different scenarios including the cooling performance under a real driving cycle, and the cold stop temperature performance are investigated and compared with a traditional aluminum LCP using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. An experimental test bench is developed to test a prototype of the hybrid LCP and verify the CFD model. The cooling performance results indicate that the use of hybrid LCP could reduce the energy consumption of the pump required for circulating the coolant up to 30% in comparison with an aluminum LCP. Moreover, the novel designed LCP improves the temperature uniformity effectively. It was also found that the hybrid LCP could significantly delay the temperature drop at the cold stop situation of the EV and therefore, reduce the energy needed for the active heating of the batteries after short-term parking. These imply that the hybrid liquid cooling plate concept could be a promising thermal management solution for EVs.