Design optimization of multiple cooling plate battery thermal management system for minimizing temperature difference considering interactions between cooling plates

As the number of lithium-ion battery (LIB) cells and modules in an electric vehicle (EV) pack increases, battery thermal management systems (BTMSs) employing multiple cooling plates have been widely adopted. However, performance discrepancies among the cooling plates lead to non-uniform temperature distribution in the LIB pack, which may result in performance degradation and potential failure. In this study, we focus on the interactions among cooling plates and optimize a multiple cooling plate BTMS to ensure uniform temperature distribution across the LIB pack. The thermal behavior and power consumption of the LIB pack are calculated using thermal fluid analysis. For optimization, minimizing the pack-level temperature difference was defined as the objective function. Constraints were imposed on both the maximum temperature and pumping power. As a result, an optimized design that reduces the temperature difference by 2.25 K is proposed by equalizing the cooling performance among the multiple cooling plates.