ABSTRACT The enhancement of performance and safety in Li‐ion batteries strongly depends on effective cooling strategies. This study presents a comprehensive, time‐dependent numerical analysis of six alternative configurations of battery thermal designs for an electric racing car. Starting from a benchmark configuration relying on natural convection only, the other configurations incorporate more complex cooling systems, including liquid cooling, forced air convection, and phase change materials (PCM), either individually or in hybrid arrangements. Three‐dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were performed on a 40‐cell lithium iron phosphate battery pack to evaluate transient temperature evolution under realistic racing operating profiles at ambient temperatures of 20, 25°C and 30°C. To identify the optimal design, a multi‐objective optimization framework is considered and solved through a weighted‐sum scalarization, combining four dimensionless normalized indicators representative of thermal efficiency and structural compactness. The results show that purely passive cooling is insufficient, whereas hybrid liquid–PCM configurations markedly reduce over‐temperatures and improve cell temperature uniformity. An original optimization procedure identifies as optimal a hybrid liquid–PCM solution capable of balancing thermal performance and system compactness while exhibiting robust thermal response over a wide ambient temperature range from 5°C to 35°C. The proposed approach provides a quantitative framework for balancing competing design requirements for high‐performance battery thermal management systems (BTMS).
Zatta et al. (Sun,) studied this question.