A novel tree -like bionic structure for liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery plates

To maintain the optimal operating temperature range for the power batteries of new energy vehicles, this paper proposes a novel tree-structured channel cold plate. An orthogonal experimental approach was employed to investigate the effects of inlet flow rate m, inlet channel quantity n, channel width d, and hierarchy ratio α on battery temperatures T_max, standard temperature difference T_σ, and pressure drop ΔP. Non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) was utilized to obtain an optimized solution set. The results reveal that the tree-like cold plate configuration including m = 15 g/s, n = 7 and 8, d = 3 mm, and α = 1:2:1 demonstrates superior performance. Thus, the developed cold plate was further compared with the conventional straight-through cold plate design. The results indicate that the proposed tree-like cold plate exhibits the maximum decreases of 13.94% in T_max, 52.94% in T_σ, and 61.5% in ΔP. The most significant improvement in the composite indicator PEC was 89%. In conclusion, the tree-like channel cold plate developed in this study provides excellent heat dissipation capability for power batteries, offering valuable insights for the thermal design of battery liquid cooling systems.