Improving Thermal Cooling Systems for Electric Vehicle Batteries: A Comparative Numerical Study and Meta-Analysis

The thermal management of the lithium-ion battery is one of the main factors which determine the safety, the fast-charging capability and the service life of the electric vehicles, and this is applied especially on the hot climates such as the Gulf region. In this paper, a reduced-order thermal network of a ten-cell 21700 module was developed, and it was used to compare six cooling strategies, namely the natural air, the forced air, the indirect liquid cold plate, the phase change material (PCM), the hybrid PCM-liquid and the single-phase immersion cooling, at the discharge rates of 1C, 2C and 3C and at the ambient temperatures of 25 C and 40 C. In addition, a random-effects meta-analysis of eight published comparisons was conducted. The results showed that, at 3C and 25 C, the peak core temperature was reduced from 58.27 C under the natural air to 34.02 C under the immersion cooling and to 34.45 C under the hybrid PCM-liquid system.