The reasonable design of a thermal management system is a key to improve the battery cooling performance. A battery thermal management system based on the combination of heat pipe and conduction element is proposed for a cylindrical battery pack. A numerical model is developed and validated with experimental results. The effect of conduction element on the thermal performance of the proposed thermal management system is numerically investigated. The results show that the conduction element significantly improves the thermal performance of the proposed thermal management system due to the increase of the contact area between conduction elements and batteries. The thermal performance can be improved by increasing the circumference angle between conduction elements and batteries to enlarge the contact area. But this improvement effect is slight when the circumference angle is greater than 95°. Its temperature can be slightly decreased by increasing the thickness of conduction element

and it is suggested that the thickness should be within 4 mm.