Investigation on liquid cold plate thermal management system with heat pipes for LiFePO4 battery pack in electric vehicles

An appropriate battery thermal management system is essential for electric vehicles to keep an optimal working temperature range with minimal temperature difference, and meanwhile to ensure the battery is more efficient and safe. In this paper, the liquid cold plate thermal management system with heat pipes is proposed to investigate the thermal characteristic of LiFePO4 battery pack during various discharge rate operations. A three-dimensional numerical model based on standard k-ε turbulent model is developed to realize the visible analysis of fluid flow and heat transfer for the proposed thermal management system. The 50 Ah battery module is used in the experiment to validate the cooling effects of proposed thermal management system relied on heat pipes, and its performance is compared with liquid cold plate without heat pipes. Furthermore, the cooling performance of the cold plate with heat pipes could be further improved through the orthogonal experiment design, the maximum temperature of battery cell and temperature difference of battery module could be dropped by 6.95% and 11.08%, as compared with the original design. What’s more, the channel height of cold plate with heat pipes has the greatest effect on the maximum temperature of battery cells and temperature difference of battery modules.