Advancements in thermal management and safety of Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles: Addressing thermal runaway and fire risk mitigation

Ensuring safe and reliable thermal regulation in lithium-ion battery packs remains a major challenge in the development of electric vehicles. Increasing energy density, fast charging requirements, and compact pack configurations intensify thermal stress during operation. Under these conditions, the probability of thermal runaway, accelerated aging, and fire related hazards increases, directly affecting operational safety and large-scale deployment. Most existing studies examine cooling approaches, safety mechanisms, or battery management strategies independently. As a result, comprehensive system level assessments that jointly address thermal control, fire risk mitigation, and intelligent monitoring remain limited. This review addresses this gap by examining recent and emerging battery thermal management strategies, with particular emphasis on dielectric immersion cooling using conventional and nanofluid based media. Experimental investigations and simulation studies reported in the literature show that immersion cooling can improve heat dissipation efficiency by approximately thirty five percent under controlled laboratory and pack level conditions. Corresponding reductions in peak cell temperature of up to forty percent are observed when compared with air cooled and indirect liquid cooled systems. The role of artificial intelligence battery management systems is also discussed as a supportive framework for diagnostics, anomaly detection, and adaptive thermal supervision, along with current challenges related to practical implementation. Recent advances in fire suppression techniques, computational thermal modeling, and Multiphysics simulation methods are further reviewed to evaluate their effectiveness in limiting cascading thermal failures in high density battery packs. Overall, this review provides a structured perspective on the development of thermally robust and safety factor battery systems suitable for next generation electric vehicle applications.