Aluminum Heat Sink Assisted Air-Cooling Thermal Management System for High Current Applications in Electric Vehicles

Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are preferred energy storage systems for vehicular applications due to the high capacity, long life, and power density. This paper offers the concept of a hybrid thermal management system (TMS), including a prismatic cell embedded fin heat sink (CHS) for high current applications. The experimental tests and numerical simulations are done to investigate the thermal characteristic of the utilized battery and CHS in natural and forced convection in 8C discharging rate (184 A). Results indicate that the maximum cell temperature in natural convection (NC) reaches 56 °C. Moreover, the temperature of the CHS in natural and forced convection reaches 51.5 °C and 31.1 °C. For further investigation, the optimization, including three cases, is done for the geometry of the forced convection cooling box. Results indicate that the maximum temperature of the CHS compared with NC reduced by 39.6%, 40.9%, and 38.4% for cases A, B, and C, respectively. In addition, there is an improvement of 6%, 28%, and 36% in the cell temperature uniformity for cases A, B, and C, respectively. It is also found that the inlet velocity of 3 m/s preserves the CHS in a safe temperature zone, which decreases the fan power consumption by 50%.