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Anurag Dwivedi,
Varun Kumar,
Manish Kumar,
- Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology, Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
- Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology, Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
- Student, Department of Electrical Engineering, Kamla Nehru Institute of Technology, Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
Abstract
Since electric vehicles (EVs) transition to high- voltage systems to enable quicker charging and enhanced delivery of power, the high heat emitted during rapid discharge is a significant challenge. This paper presents a direct comparative study of passive air cooling and active liquid cooling of a lithium-ion battery pack. Due to the high cost of constructing the physical prototypes, we created a computationally efficient and hierarchical virtual prototype in MATLAB Simscape. We used a lumped thermal mass method to scale a pre-parameterized Panasonic UR18650ZTA cell to a pack. Then we tested the thermal limits of the pack at a heavy rate of discharge (2C). The initial model was based on passive natural convection that was soon found to be ineffective in rapid heat removal when under heavy loads. To correct this, we added an active liquid cooling path in the simulation. Our results clearly show the advantage of an active cooling system. Compared to passive cooling, which has a problem with heat accumulation, the active liquid cooling system has a stabilized overall pack temperature of about 304 K and a close cell to cell temperature difference of less than 1 K, which guarantees consistent heat distribution and greatly reduces the chances of thermal runaway. Finally, this paper shows the limitations of passive cooling at higher discharge rates and confirms active thermal control as a condition of safe, high-performance EV battery systems.
Keywords: Active liquid cooling, High-voltage battery pack, Hierarchical modeling, Battery Thermal Management System (BTMS), MATLAB Simscape, Electric Vehicles (EV)
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| Volume | 04 | |
| 02 | ||
| Received | 22/07/2026 | |
| Accepted | 27/07/2026 | |
| Published | 01/08/2026 | |
| Publication Time | 10 Days |