The effort to curb emissions and climate change drives automobile manufacturers away from fossil fuels toward electric power. In an electric vehicle (EV), the lithium‑ion (Li-ion) battery pack serves the purpose of the fuel tank, and the cells are safest and perform most efficiently when they operate between about 25 °C and 45 °C. When operated outside this range, they lose performance, shorten battery life, or risk catching fire due to unwanted side reactions in the cell. This study uses face- and side-cooling strategies to present lightweight, liquid-cooled thermal management solutions for pouch-type battery packs. Instead of cooling the entire cell surface, which is followed conventionally, infrared imaging (IR) is used to identify hotspots in the cell. Based on insights from IR analysis, a novel T-shaped cold plate (TCP) is designed and experimentally tested for targeted face cooling, reducing system weight while keeping cell temperatures below 45 °C.. A new graphite-insulation sheet (GIS) has been developed for side cooling. Experimental investigations showed a superior cooling performance compared to the standard insulation sheet. These solutions offer efficient, lightweight, and thermally effective EV battery thermal management options. The study also explores the immersion cooling techniques with environmental free dielectric fluids. This study also presents a hybrid machine learning framework for reconstructing full-field surface temperature distributions of lithium-ion pouch cells using sparse thermocouple data.

 

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