Influence of the oblique fin arrangement on the fluid flow and thermal performance of liquid cold plate

Electric vehicle (EV) is advancing as the transportation industry and the demand is expanding globally. The use of liquid cold plate (LCP) in EV battery is more effective in providing the desire temperature rather than using the conventional air cooling. The use of straight fins is being switched to oblique-shape fins to assist disruption of the thermal boundary layer development. The arrangement of fins in the LCP also will affect the performance of it cooling the battery. Three different arrangement of the oblique fin are developed to enhance the fluid flow and heat transfer performance. The LCP contains three arrangements of oblique fin namely as inline, incline and loureved. Experimental and numerical results reveal the good aggrement where the Nusselt number is enhanced with the louvered arrangement. Among three arrangements, loureved obtained the lowest surface temperature of the battery followed by inline and incline. It also found that Nusselt number increases as the Reynolds number increases. The LCP is able to maintain the average surface temperature of the battery below permitted working temperature of 50 °C. This shows that the present LCP with oblique fin could be a promising method for EV battery thermal management. Keywords: Liquid cold plate, Oblique fin, Heat transfer, Electric vehicl

The effect of geometrical parameters on heat transfer characteristics of microchannels heat sink with different shapes

The effect of geometrical parameters on water flow and heat transfer characteristics in microchannels is numerically investigated for Reynolds number range of 100-1000. The three-dimensional steady, laminar flow and heat transfer governing equations are solved using finite volume method. The computational domain is taken as the entire heat sink including the inlet/outlet ports, wall plenums, and microchannels. Three different shapes of microchannel heat sinks are investigated in this study which are rectangular, trapezoidal, and triangular. The water flow field and heat transfer phenomena inside each shape of heated microchannels are examined with three different geometrical dimensions. Using the averaged fluid temperature and heat transfer coefficient in each shape of the heat sink to quantify the fluid flow and temperature distributions, it is found that better uniformities in heat transfer coefficient and temperature can be obtained in heat sinks having the smallest hydraulic diameter. It is also inferred that the heat sink having the smallest hydraulic diameter has better performance in terms of pressure drop and friction factor among other heat sinks studied