Cooling System Performance and Efficiency of Mini-Channel Cold Plate in Various Flow Regimes

Electric vehicle demands rises in the last decades due to the trend shifting toward green energy sources. The main challenge in providing a reliable electric vehicle for this demand is to maintain the performance of the energy storage system, whereby the Li-ion battery is the most popular choice in recent years. In Li-ion batteries, the performance is highly dependent on the working temperature hence, battery cooling improvement is required. One of the core interests of the research in this field is by building a serpentine mini-channel cold plate. However, albeit having a high heat transfer coefficient, pressure drop in such system remains the problem for the system efficiency. In this study, a set of experiments were conducted to investigate the heat transfer performance and efficiency of a serpentine cold plate design in various flow regimes. The results demonstrate an improvement in the heat transfer performance, indicated by the high average Nusselt number (Nu) up to 2000 for both flow regimes. Furthermore, efficiency investigation found that laminar test case has higher efficiency although the turbulent flow provides larger Nu at around 2481.5, compared to 2215.7 in the laminar test case. The pressure drop increases considerably, reducing the cold-plate efficiency from 21.9 to only 8.8. This indicates that the enhancement by increasing the Reynolds number (Re) in such a design is not recommended due to the high power requirement. © 2024 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.