Innovative approaches in battery thermal management systems: Using porous channel and nanofluid

In this thesis, 2 battery thermal management system (BTMS) designs considered for Li-ion battery cells and numerically investigated. Serpentine type cooling channel is considered to be porous and the permeability of the channel is considered between Darcy number of 10-5 and 10-1 in design 1. Cold plates are used which has corrugated cooling channels that number of channel range 3, 4 and 5 with number of square grooves 6, 9 and 12 placed between prismatic Li-ion battery cells in Design 2. Al2O3-Cu/water hybrid nanofluid used as heat transfer fluid for both designs while nanoparticle volume fraction are used up to 2%. For the design 1, the maximum temperature drops when nanoparticle solid volume fraction and permeability of the medium are increased. When lowest and highest values of permeability cases are compared, temperature drop of 1.25 K and 3 K are obtained for water and nanofluid with the highest loading of nanoparticles. At Da=10-1, maximum temperature drop is 2.4 K while it is only 1 K at Da= 10-5 when cooling medium of water and nanofluid with highest hybrid nanoparticle loading amount are compared. For the design 2, the maximum temperature drops when nanoparticle solid volume fraction and number of corrugated cooling channels are increased. When the lowest and highest number of cooling channels cases are compared, maximum temperature reduce 3.07 K and 1.86 K are observed for water and Al2O3-Cu/water hybrid nanofluid with the highest nanoparticle volumetric fraction. Li-ion batteries is a promising way to energy storage issue, methods for thermal management designs such as presented in this thesis would be helpful for further system development and performance optimization.