Extreme battery thermal management comprehensive optimization method based on pin fin heat transfer enhancement, minimum coolant predictive control and thermal fault early alarm

Battery thermal management is the key for battery safe and reliable operation. Existing thermal management solutions mainly focus on cooling capability improvement while ignoring other crucial issues such as coolant consumption control and thermal failure prevention, inevitably causing compromised performance in real-world extreme operating condition. This study developed an extreme battery thermal management comprehensive optimization decision method that simultaneously enhance cooling performance, coolant flow control performance and anti-thermal fault capability. A pin fin-based cross cold plate battery thermal management system is designed as the physics prototype. Primary analysis covered pin fin heat transfer enhancement, efficient pin fin non-uniform arrangement design, and pump power consumption. To achieve better battery temperature control with minimum coolant consumption under computation cost limitation, a gate recurrent unit surrogate-based minimum coolant predictive control method is conducted, enabling precise battery temperature control using less coolant at each control interval. The position, number, size of the pin fins are determined aiming to minimize the battery surface maximum temperature, improve the control performance, and reduce pump power consumption. For each candidate design, the model predictive controller adaptively regulates coolant inlet flow to stabilize battery temperature in optimization. Compared with the baseline design, the optimized battery thermal management system design can better adapt extreme operating condition with each pin fin fully used, demonstrating battery surface maximum temperature reduction of 2.10 K, pump power saving of 48.54%, and 1.00% improvement in control performance. In addition, a thermal fault early alarm-based decision algorithm is developed to identify the most thermal robust solution from the optimal thermal management system designs, indicating enhanced anti-thermal fault resistance under harsh operating condition. This work introduces a systematically extreme battery thermal management optimization method, yielding significant improvements in both the reliability and efficiency of the battery in practical application under extreme condition.