Thermal Performance of a Honeycomb-Inspired Liquid Cooling Plate for Lithium-ion Battery Cooling

Temperature control has a crucial effect on the efficiency, safety, and lifetime of lithium-ion batteries (LiBs). For this reason, developing effective cooling solutions remains an active area of battery thermal management research. In this study, a honeycomb-shaped (HC-S) liquid cooling plate (LCP) was designed and manufactured for the thermal management of a pouch-type LiB. Although biomimetic and HC-S cooling structures have been investigated in battery thermal management studies, experimental evaluations of honeycomb-inspired LCPs for pouch-type LiBs with different coolant media are still limited. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature by experimentally assessing HC-S LCP and directly comparing various coolant circulation under the same discharge condition. The LCP was produced from Aluminum 6061-T6 using Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining and experimentally tested under a constant 1C discharge rate. Pure water and a 50% pure water-50% monoethylene glycol (MEG)-based coolant mixture were circulated through the plate to evaluate their cooling performance. Among the tested cooling scenarios, the best thermal performance was obtained with 100% pure water circulation. In this case, the maximum temperature (Tmax) on the battery surface decreased from 42.595 °C to 28.939 °C, corresponding to a 32.06% reduction compared with the uncooled condition. The average temperature (Tavg) on surface was also reduced by 29.12%, from 38.935 °C to 27.598 °C. In addition, pure water circulation improved temperature uniformity by lowering the maximum temperature difference (∆Tmax) on the battery surface to approximately 2 °C. The results show that the proposed HC-S LCP can effectively maintain the battery temperature within the optimum operating range of 15-35 °C and improve the thermal safety of LiB.