Abstract: Lithium-ion battery is widely used in electric vehicles and energy storage because of its excellent electrochemical characteristics, but its performance is greatly affected by working temperature. Therefore, designing the reasonable and effective thermal management system is a key technology to promote the development of lithium-ion battery. This paper summarizes the common thermal management systems, including the research status, advantages and disadvantages of air cooling, phase change material cooling, heat pipe cooling and liquid cooling. Especially it introduces the current optimization methods of liquid cooling technology for the direct contact liquid cooling and indirect contact liquid cooling. For the limitations of a single thermal management system, it also analyzes the thermal management research status of liquid cooling combined with other methods from the perspective of coupled thermal management system. Finally, the direction of comprehensive optimization and intelligent control for liquid cooling management system is proposed, and the liquid cooling combining with the passive heat dissipation and linking of the battery management system has great development potential.

Key words: lithium-ion battery, liquid cooling, thermal management system, optimization