Novel Unsteady Conjugate Cooling Mechanism

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.

This project opens up a new avenue of exploring much larger space-time and fluid-solid design space for general cooling designs relevant to a wide range of challenging engineering applications. The industrial beneficiaries in UK are described as follows.

- Battery Electric Vehicle. The battery performance and lifetime are strongly influenced by their working temperature either at the time of charging or discharging. An efficient thermal management system in battery technology becomes essential for this emerging EV market in the UK, as highlighted by UK leading automotive consultancy Ricardo Plc (see Ricardo Letter of Support). The innovative cooling strategy proposed in this project can lead to potential step improvements in cooling efficiency to meet the increasing demand for high energy density with fast charging/discharging capacity.

- Electronic cooling. The fast growth of power consumption in electronic equipment for a wide range of UK industries demands more effective thermal management solution. For example, high power density onboard electronics in next generation aircraft requires efficient temperature control (See BAE letter of support); The cooling system for next generation CPUs (for example, Intel) needs innovative and effective design strategy.

- Power generation industry. The scan-cooling concept and physical understanding on unsteady conjugate heat transfer can also be applied to thermal management of hot components in power generation industry. UK industries such as Rolls-Royce, Siemens will benefit from the research outcome. Efficient thermal design enables longer life, higher reliability and energy efficiency.

The research outcome will also have impact across a broader group of beneficiaries, including:

- The Society and Environment. The improvement on cooling technology will promote the further development of battery electric vehicles, which will play a key role in achieving the UK government committed target of zero-emission by 2050.

- UK Economy. New business and job opportunities will be created by more competitive products and services in energy, transportation, and computing industries as a result of the innovative technologies investigated during this project, as evident in the letters of support from our industry partners BAE, Ricardo and SCA Catapult.

- Academia in the UK. Researchers in multiple disciplines including experimental fluid mechanics, CFD, heat transfer, mechatronics and control will benefit from the new research dimension and findings from this project.

- Early career research staff involved. The project will act as a platform for the technologically-focused training for the development of early-career researchers. These researchers will work in a multidisciplinary research consortium with unique access to a wealth of world-class expertise and research facilities. All staff involved will gain significant positive research experience in a project of this interdisciplinary nature.

- Wider International Community where impact will be made: emphasizing the technological capabilities in the UK and its leadership in the field of fluid mechanics and heat transfer.