Project overview

Battery Cooling Plate

The brief: battery thermal management for Frankie, a taxi fleet manager who wants to reduce long-term fleet maintenance costs. Fixed parameters: a 420 × 210 × 70 mm battery pack, an aluminium 6061-T4 plate, water coolant at 12 g/s and 25 °C.
Rationale: design objectives, four initial ideas evaluated on topology, temperature uniformity, pressure drop, surface coverage and manufacturability, benchmarking, CFD comparison and the selected concept.
Hand calculations: assumptions, parameters, pressure and heat transfer equations written in Python, and graphs of Reynolds number, pressure drop, battery temperature and flow velocity against diameter, leading to a chosen diameter of 10 mm.
Hand calculations of pressure (flow velocity, Reynolds number, friction factor, major and minor losses, pumping power) and heat transfer (heat generation, convection and conduction resistance, coolant and interface temperatures).
CFD setup and meshing: geometry, materials, boundary conditions, model assumptions, and mesh selection, refinement and quality checks.
CFD results: temperature contours and streamlines, velocity streamlines and heat flux, pressure contours, and design considerations.
Hand calculations vs CFD results: pressure drop, average and maximum temperature compared, with the discrepancies explained and model limitations.
Benchmarking of the pumpkin, optimised serpentine, experimenting with bends, and multiple inlet and outlet designs, with key features, limitations and how each informed the design.
Iterative design development: exploring inlet and outlet placement and channel placement across four ideas, leading to the final idea.
CFD on the iterated design: temperature uniformity, pressure drop, heat flux, geometry optimisation and the optimised CFD results.
Back to the start