Topology optimization on heat dissipation of liquid cooling plates for lithium-ion batteries

With the continuous improvement of performance requirements for power batteries, an efficient battery thermal management system has become the key to ensuring the safety and performance of lithium-ion batteries. However, traditional liquid cooling plate designs have the problem of being unable to balance heat dissipation efficiency and flow resistance. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a microchannel structure design method for liquid cooling plates based on three-dimensional topology optimization and variable density method. By constructing a mathematical model with the goals of maximizing heat exchange efficiency and minimizing fluid energy consumption, and combining RAMP interpolation technology and density filtering strategy to optimize the channel layout, the heat dissipation performance of enhanced and topology-optimized liquid cooling plates is compared and analyzed, which presents the first 3D topology-optimized microchannel plate for prismatic batteries using RAMP under conjugate heat transfer. Simulation results show that the pressure drop of the topology-optimized liquid cooling plate is only 21.19 Pa, 90 % lower than that of the enhanced type. While its maximum temperature is slightly higher (25.77 °C vs. 25.33 °C), this demonstrates the balanced performance of the topology-optimized design in heat dissipation uniformity and fluid resistance—achieving significantly lower pressure drop at the cost of a minor increase in peak temperature and expanded the research on the design of the power battery thermal management system.