Sachin Sharma

The performance, safety and service life of lithium-ion batteries are greatly affected by the operating temperature and temperature uniformity. Hence, an efficient battery thermal management system is essential to control the temperature increase and reduce the thermal non-uniformity in densely packed battery modules. This work investigates an air-cooled battery thermal management system with inclined aluminum baffles for a 5 × 5 pack of 18,650 cylindrical cells. Thermal and hydraulic performance are systematically evaluated according to the baffle geometry, inclination angle and airflow conditions. Eight configurations (case-C1 to case-C8) with a bare-pack baseline are studied at Reynolds numbers of 3032–7580 with baffle inclinations of 30° and 45°. The results show that the 45° inclined configuration (case-C5) provides the most favorable thermal performance, consistently producing higher Nusselt numbers and reducing ΔT by about 5–6 K, while keeping T max near 335 K. With an increase in baffle length, thermal enhancement increases up to L/D = 0.11, beyond which further improvement is limited due to increased flow resistance and flow bypassing. To enable fast thermo-hydraulic prediction, an XGBoost surrogate model was built based on the computational fluid dynamics dataset. The model achieved the testing R ² value of 0.9934 for friction factor and 0.9937 for the Nusselt number with a root mean square error of 0.0226 and 0.8503, respectively. These results show the potential of optimized baffle geometry to improve air-side battery cooling, with the associated hydraulic penalty considered, and the developed XGBoost framework offers an efficient approach for surrogate-based thermo-hydraulic prediction and future design optimization.

In the current numerical study, the viability and sustainability of a solar heat collector (SHC) have been rigorously analyzed through the lens of exergy analysis. The SHC with roughness in the form of symmetrical V‐rib gaps has been selected for detailed numerical investigation. The study focuses on deriving the dominant parameters affecting the performance of the SHC, including the relative gap width (), number of gaps () in the limbs of ribs, and fluid flow Reynolds number, which varied from 4000 to 18,000. The absorber plate with roughness was thoroughly examined to evaluate the losses and irreversibility that persist in the thermal system. The results of the numerical analysis revealed the maximum exergy efficiency to be 3.87%. Furthermore, the study examined the long‐term feasibility of the system, evaluating its sustainability index at a remarkable 1.0319 value, while the magnitude of the waste–energy ratio fetched an impressive score of 0.991. Additionally, the study found that the system has a significant improvement potential of 10.04. Overall, these findings provide critical insights into the performance and sustainability of SHCs, paving the way for future research and development in this crucial field.