Thermal Design and Analysis of a Prismatic Lithium on Battery Cooled by Mini-channels

Batteries have profound importance in today's world as they are useful in powering the future without fossil fuels because of their properties, such as high energy density and durability. Volumetric and packing efficiency is better for a prismatic cell when compared with a cylindrical cell, whereas heat will be higher for a prismatic cell. This makes them a hot topic of research and development (R&D), with researchers finding ever more ways to improve. In this work, an attempt is made to study the effect of various mini-channel configurations on prismatic cell thermal management including the effect of C-rate, coolant flow rate, and coolant inlet temperature on temperature gradient and maximum cell temperature using ANSYS-Fluent by using an equivalent circuit model (ECM) in multi-scale multidimensional (MSMD) add-on module. With reference to the maximum temperature of 43.08 degrees C occurring in Design 1, which is the base model, for a coolant inlet temperature of 40 degrees C and a velocity of 0.05 m/s and 1 C-rate, results show that there is an increase in the maximum temperature for Design 2 and Design 3 by 4.68% and 0.59%, respectively. The same was found to be a 3.01% and 4.16% reduction in pressure drop for Design 2 and Design 3 from a base value of 65.02 Pa. In comparing the output parameters of the three mini-channel designs, Design 3 offers an ideal compromise between maximum temperature and pressure drop when compared to the other two designs.