To efficiently increase the energy density of the battery pack, cell-to-pack has become a widely used packing technology for electric vehicles. Among different cooling methods, immersion cooling with feedback control can provide robust thermal management to keep the temperature of all battery cells within a desirable range, therefore, ensuring a good cycle life performance for the battery pack. However, the layout of the battery pack and the target temperature of the feedback control are currently decided separately in the design of the battery pack and its immersion cooling system, which can only produce suboptimal results with a low thermal management efficiency. This paper presents the study of battery pack design study with immersion cooling that aims to lower the energy consumption of the immersion cooling system for a 21700 cylindrical battery pack using a control co-design method. First, a high-fidelity finite element model is established based on experimental data to predict the temperature and energy consumption considering the change in battery layout and target temperature. A Gaussian process based surrogate model is developed and used to predict the performance in different pack design scenarios therefore identifying an optimal design. The results showed that the optimal design obtained from the presented study lowered the immersion cooling system’s energy consumption by 13%.

• Published 1 paper as the 1st author on IMECE2023