Numerical investigation on a multi-objective topology optimization for a liquid cold plate design reflecting thermal-hydraulic performance in high-power pouch-type lithium-ion batteries

초록

This study proposed a multi-objective topology optimization framework for designing a liquid cold plate considering thermal-hydraulic performance. Previous studies generally assumed a total heat generation rate over a single solid domain of a battery cell. In contrast, this study incorporated five region-specific heat generation rate derived from experiments to account for the thermal gradient. A parametric study of the weight parameter was conducted, and the best-performing liquid cold plate design was selected using the j/f1/3-factor. To validate topology-optimized cold plate performance, three-dimensional simulations were performed to compare the proposed design with a cold plate optimized under the total heat generation rate and two conventional cold plates with straight and serpentine channels. The proposed cold plate achieved superior performance compared with the cold plate optimized based on the total heat generation. The average temperature decreased by 0.231-0.645 degrees C at the first position and by 0.020-0.242 degrees C at the second position, reducing the temperature deviation by up to 0.96 degrees C. The pressure drop decreased by 7.53-7.73% owing to the reduced number of branch channels. Among the four cold plate designs, the proposed topology-optimized cold plate based on localized heat generation rates achieved the best comprehensive thermal-hydraulic performance over the entire Reynoldsnumber range, with a more pronounced advantage at low Reynolds numbers. This finding demonstrates that neglecting realistic battery heat generation characteristics can lead to biased designs and degraded cooling performance.

키워드