Numerical and experimental evaluation of cooling strategies for prismatic li-ion battery modules designed for containerised energy storage

This study compares liquid-cooling, air-cooling, and hybrid thermal management strategies for 50 Ah LiFePO 4 prismatic battery modules intended for containerised energy storage systems (ESSs). A three-dimensional CFD model developed in ANSYS Fluent and validated experimentally was employed to investigate the modules' thermal behaviour under dynamic charge-discharge conditions. The study introduces and evaluates a sandwich-type liquid-cooling cold plate incorporating serpentine copper channels embedded in a PET core and enclosed by aluminium sheets, combined with L-shaped aluminium heat-spreading profiles between adjacent cells. The air-cooling configurations based on increased inter-cell spacing and lateral airflow openings. Attention is given to the relative influence of cooling mechanisms and the intrinsic thermal resistance of prismatic cells on thermal performance. The results show that L-shaped profiles substantially enhance heat spreading, reducing surface temperatures and improving temperature uniformity, while the cold plate contribution remains confined to the module bottom. In contrast, air cooling provides more effective heat removal from the cell surfaces. Increasing inter-cell spacing and introducing lateral airflow openings significantly improved airflow distribution and reduced temperature gradients within the module. Although the hybrid liquid–air cooling configuration achieved the best surface-temperature control, maintaining almost all cell surfaces below 30 °C, the maximum cell-core temperature remained close to 45–46 °C, similar to the air-cooling configurations. This finding demonstrates that the cells intrinsic thermal resistance dominates heat dissipation. Overall, the optimised forced-air cooling configuration, combined with L-shaped aluminium profiles, provides the most favourable balance between thermal performance, temperature uniformity, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness for the containerised ESS application considered.