Conventional cold plate designs are manufactured widely to provide cooling for the batteries in electric cars. While companies seek more efficient alternatives to manage the battery cooling system, human participation and trial-and-error scenarios are still dominant in the engineering design process. The current technologies can make this process smoother using generative design with topology optimization. This paper explains the fundaments of topology optimization for battery cold plates and illustrates the added value of the method through multiple examples and comparisons.

• How to use a generative design to optimize the performance of a battery cold plate with minimal human input or interaction while taking into account the manufacturability
• A fully three-dimensional solid and fluid domain model and an interface heat transfer model are presented for the cold plate modeling.
• A comparative case study demonstrated that the conventional cold plate designs only perform similarly to the generative design at the expense of a higher pressure drop or a higher temperature distribution.