GOALI: Direct Immersion Cooling for Battery Thermal Management

This GOALI project focuses on understanding the fundamentals of a new approach to cool battery cells directly with a liquid instead of conventional cooling method requiring additional hardware for removing the heat. Excessive and non-uniform temperatures within battery cells lead to reduced performance and lifetime of the batteries, as well as life- and property-threatening issues such as fires and explosions.

Reducing the temperatures and variations in temperature through this new liquid cooling approach could significantly enhance the safety, performance, and reliability of the battery systems. But the fundamentals of the cooling approach are not well understood. New cooling fluids are needed to meet the multi-functional requirements of the system.

Models and experiments are needed to assess the impact of the new cooling system on the battery temperatures. This project will focus on both the fundamental properties of the cooling fluid and its impact on the performance of the battery itself through a combination of experiments and modeling. New knowledge from this work can lead to improvements to batteries that will have a ripple effect on improvements to technology including electric vehicles and mobile devices, as well as indirectly on the environment through improved energy usage.

This work focuses on direct immersion cooling of battery cells as a method to reduce internal temperature gradients and improve performance through three fundamental thrusts: (1) First, the team will experimentally evaluate the impact formulations have on new immersion cooling fluids then leverage statistical and machine learning tools to understand the function-property relations. (2) Second, a data-driven modeling framework will be established to integrate experimental data on thermal, electrochemical, and fluid transport properties to predict performance of the battery system. (3) Third, the team will calibrate, then validate, the modeling framework against experimental data and use it to elucidate the fundamental physics of battery cooling. This project combines fluid molecular structure and composition analysis, novel multi-physics metrology, and multiscale physics modeling to generate the new knowledge necessary for a fundamental understanding of direct immersion cooling of lithium-ion battery cells.

This work will combine fundamental studies of new cooling fluids to enhance heat dissipation with experimental and computational investigation of the coupled thermal and electrochemical performance of battery cells. Ultimately, this work enables the rational, data-driven design of improved battery systems that push the existing limits on key performance metrics, while maintaining safety, through new chemistries, materials, and geometries.

Beyond the technical aspects of this university-industry partnership, educational activities including internships and training programs are proposed that would facilitate educating the next generation of battery engineers and scientists.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.