Canopy-to-canopy liquid cooling for the thermal management of lithium-ion batteries, a constructal approach

Abstract

With the growing interest on electric vehicles comes the question of the thermal management of their battery pack. In this work, we propose a thermally efficient solution consisting in inserting between the cells a liquid cooling system based on constructal canopy-to-canopy architectures. In such systems, the cooling fluid is driven from a trunk channel to perpendicular branches that make the tree canopy. An opposite tree collects the liquid in such a way that the two trees match canopy-to-canopy. The configuration of the cooling solution is predicted following the constructal methodology, leading to the choice of the hydraulic diameter ratios. We show that such configurations allow extracting most of the non-uniformly generated heat by the battery cell during the discharging phase, while using a small mass flow rate.