Simulation on cooling performance characteristics of a refrigerant-cooled active thermal management system for lithium ion batteries

•Numerical models of passive and active two-phase TMSs are developed.•Numerical results show good agreement with experimental results and reference data.•The performance of active TMS is greatly affected by the refrigerant temperature.•Both TMSs show good performance under mild and stressful operating conditions.•In the cyclic operation, the active TMS has better performance than the passive TMS.