Battery Cooling via Acoustic Streaming
Electric-vehicle batteries generate intense local heat loads, yet most cooling architectures still rely on steady laminar flow through narrow channels. This creates a persistent bottleneck: a thin thermal boundary layer forms on the coolant-side wall and resists further heat transfer. Increasing pump power helps only marginally — and costs energy.
FISH Innovation has developed a vibration-enhanced cooling technique that uses controlled acoustic micro-streaming to disrupt this boundary layer directly inside the coolant channel. A lightweight piezoelectric actuator excites a benign squeeze-mode vibration in the plate, creating oscillatory particle velocities orders of magnitude greater than the mean flow.
The result is a coolant field that is no longer purely laminar: streaming rolls penetrate the full channel height, continually renewing the near-wall fluid and dramatically increasing heat-transfer efficiency.
This approach is particularly suited to thin cold plates, laminar-regime channels, and applications where pump power is a limiting factor. It also aligns with the industry trend toward highly compact, low-energy thermal management solutions for EVs.
Key capabilities demonstrated in modelling and early evaluation
– Boundary-layer disruption without increasing flow rate — oscillatory velocities generate strong cross-channel mixing even under realistic through-flow conditions
– Substantial uplift in effective heat transfer — modelling shows that vibration-induced streaming can more than double the convective performance of a standard cold-plate geometry, even at modest actuation levels
– Pathway to major pump-power reduction — because heat transfer improves without additional coolant flow, the same thermal performance could be achieved at significantly lower flow rates, offering the potential for large system-level energy savings
– Lightweight, low-power actuation — piezoelectric drive requirements remain in the low-watt regime per plate, making the technique compatible with vehicle-level power budgets
Organisations interested in evaluating the technology, exploring integration feasibility, or partnering on device-scale optimisation are encouraged to make contact.