Performance Improvement of a Heat Sink for Battery Thermal Management System

Dissipating heat generated by onboard battery systems is a key thermal management challenge for hybrid/electric aircraft. The National Research Council Canada is collaborating with Calogy Solutions, Ltd. (Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada) to support their development of a novel aviation battery module. The goal of the project is to optimize the heat sink design for battery thermal management system by minimizing thermal resistance as well as reducing overall weight, considering fabrication cost to be used by the industry. In this research, the original heat sink used by Calogy (plate-fin type) was numerically simulated using commercial software and the results were compared with the experiment. This was done to validate the numerical simulation was accurate enough to be used for future simulations. The heat transfer of the heat sink was enhanced by optimizing fin dimensions and spacing, and fin design modification (a first in this application), based on system analysis of a kW scale hybrid/electric aircraft. The selected model as the optimized heat sink resulted in about 34% improvement in heat transfer coefficient, and about 24% reduction in weight comparing with the original plate-fin type heat sink.