Explore Battery Cold Plate Concepts Using Ansys Discovery CFD Simulation

Hello and welcome to this video on Ansys Discovery for conjugate heat transfer CFD simulation of a battery cold plate. We have our geometry here of a battery module, 12 cells, a cold plate at the bottom, cold plate, and a liquid coolant path. The first step we'll do is to assign materials.

So I'll hide some items like the cells, the end plastics, and the cold plate. So now I'll just highlight the shells, go to the Simulation tab, select Materials, pick on, let's see, we'll pick on the aluminum alloy here. So that sets those cells, shells, and we'll hide and show the end plastics.

Select those two, go to Materials, pick on Other to go find something, and up here over to the right, I start typing plastic, get us in the neighborhood, and I don't know, maybe find something like polypropylene. Those two are assigned. And we'll hide the ends. Show the cold plate.

Materials assigned. Try to do the aluminum alloy for that one too. And then the fluid zone, we highlight that, Materials, water liquid, highlight that. Then we unhide the cells, select them all, and now we pick on Other again, and up here, we'll start typing User.

So User Defined Solid, and for now, we'll put a density of 3000. And we'll have to wait on specific heat and thermal conductivity.

The next step would be to go to the Model, to make sure you have the Explore tab going, open, go to the Solid Thermal, and we'll hide everything but the shells, the cells, select all the cells, this time we want a heat, so this is active heat, and we'll put a value of. Next step would be fluid flow.

And right now, this would be our flow, so we'll add in display of the fluid path. And we'll select on the inlet, use a mass flow rate, put 3 grams per second, and inlet temperature of 23°C. Next will be going to Still Flow, and we do an outlet, we use a pressure outlet, Accept.

So now we've got the flow inlet and the flow outlet. There's bonded connections between solid materials, and then there's automatic creation of fluid-solid interfaces between fluid and solid zones. We'll check the notifications here.

It's talking about thermal conductivity, so we'll go back to the definition of the User-Defined Solid, right-click edit, and the specific heat is zero, but we want something like 1224, and we'll use an orthotropic conductivity, do a 32 and 32 in the Y direction and one in the Z direction.

Okay, that helps with that. Now notifications, and a flow outlet, I must have, let's see if I edit here, change this from Inlet to Outlet. So that fixes that. Now we're down to no notifications. In terms of meshing, there's a global, and I'll turn everything on.

So global fidelity, I'll use something like 66% here. And then I want to local on the fluid path, so I'll hide everything but the fluid zone, select everything, go to Local, and I'll use half a millimeter, Go All.

And I think we're ready for simulation, so we go back to Simulation Options, specify a steady state, that doesn't matter, Additional fluid, we'll be using mass flow weighted average for monitors, And in the solving method, the flow rate is pretty low, so we'll stick with laminar.

And I guess we're ready to solve. Check here, it's confirming that I'm using laminar instead of turbulent flow. I'll go over here, press on the Solve button. And the solve starts.

You can see the progress going around, the little white highlight going around the yellow as it's meshing and doing the actual iterations. It's getting close to being done. It's everything turned green, it still says it's solving. You already see a contour of temperatures on the external surfaces.

The legend for the temperature isn't changing much in terms of maximum temperature, and our simulation says it's complete. So now we can look at some post-processing.

Obviously, we have the contour plots of temperature for the module, see the influence of the cool temperature of the coolant coming in through the inlet.

We can also look at streamlines, so we'll deactivate the contours, activate the streamlines, maybe they will hide, just focus on the coolant path, we can look at the temperature rise, we can look at the total pressure, we can also look at the velocity. That concludes our video.

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