Comprehensive feasibility study on metal foam use in single-phase immersion cooling for battery thermal management system

The growing demand for eco-friendly electric vehicles has spurred efforts to extend their driving range, which in turn increases battery heat generation, impacting performance and safety. Immersion cooling technology, known for its superior thermal efficiency, is being extensively researched to overcome the limitations of traditional cooling methods. This study introduces a newly designed metal foam-assisted immersion battery thermal management system (BTMS) and analyzes various BTMS designs incorporating different metal foams and dielectric fluids. This approach aims to enhance cooling performance by effectively utilizing the fluid's capabilities. The metal foam-assisted immersion cooling achieves a maximum temperature of 38.3 °C, which is an improvement over pure immersion cooling at 44.3 °C and conventional cooling at 50.2 °C. Moreover, the temperature difference is reduced from 8 K in conventional methods to 6 K with metal foam. This research evaluates metal foam properties such as porosity, PPI, structure, and material, highlighting the importance of selecting suitable foam. It also investigates various dielectric fluids to determine their impact on cooling performance with and without metal foam. The optimized combination of silver metal foam and fluid configurations achieves a 5 K temperature difference while maintaining energy efficiency, reducing power consumption by 37% with a flow control strategy. The enhanced structure exhibits superior performance at the module level, demonstrating improved fluid uniformity and more effective cooling. •A metal foam assisted immersion cooling system is newly proposed for fast charging.•Metal foam resolves an inadequate utilization of immersion cooling capacity.•BTMSs are comprehensively investigated with various metal foams and fluids.•Silver metal foam with Opteon SF10 exhibits the best battery cooling performance.•Implementation of flow control strategies reduces power consumption by 37%.