Novel Unsteady Conjugate Cooling Mechanism

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Switching to electric vehicles becomes a global trend for carbon reduction. Battery cooling is one of the critical challenges to ensure the performance, safety, and reliability of electrochemical energy conversion and storage systems. In this era of digitalization, there is a surge of demand for high power density of electronic equipment. Efficient thermal management will play an important role in most of our future engineering applications. Flow pulsation helps our healthy blood flow system by periodically scrubbing away local accumulations in the blood vessels. Cooling efficiency could be greatly improved with the similar physical mechanism. This project proposes a novel unsteady thermal management methodology. Instead of distributing the fluids to a cooling network in a steady manner, the proposed scan-cooling method aims to control and optimize the flow unsteadiness by investigating additional design variables including scan frequency, amplitude, solid surface structure and conduction, etc. This project involves closely coupled experimental and numerical investigations. Experimentally, time-resolved flow and temperature fields will be captured by advanced optical flow measurement techniques. Both simplified and realistic cooling models will be tested and analyzed. Numerically, two novel features of unsteady fluid-thermal Conjugate Heat Transfer methodologies will be examined, validated and utilized in this study.The research outcome should open up new design space and potentially bring a step improvement for the existing thermal management methods.