Novel Unsteady Conjugate Cooling Mechanism

改用电动汽车成为全球碳减排的趋势。电池冷却是确保电化学能量转换和储存系统的性能、安全和可靠性的关键挑战之一。在这个数字化时代，对高功率密度的电子设备的需求激增。高效的热管理将在我们未来的大多数工程应用中发挥重要作用。血流搏动通过定期清除血管中的局部积聚来帮助我们健康的血液流动系统。在相同的物理机制下，可以大大提高冷却效率。本项目提出了一种新的非稳态热管理方法。扫描冷却方法不是以稳定的方式将流体分配到冷却网络，而是通过研究附加的设计变量，包括扫描频率、扫描幅度、固体表面结构和导热等，来控制和优化流动的不稳定。该项目涉及紧密耦合的实验和数值研究。在实验上，先进的光流测量技术将捕获时间分辨的流场和温度场。简化的和实际的冷却模型都将被测试和分析。在数值上，本研究将检验、验证和利用非定常流热共轭换热方法的两个新特性，研究成果将开辟新的设计空间，并有可能为现有的热管理方法带来进步。

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.