24/09/2026
Lightweight vs. Durable: Why Stamped Cooling Plates Win
Lighter isn't the same as flimsier — and in EV and BESS packs, the cooling plate that adds the least mass while still pulling heat out of the cells is usually the one that ends up on the drawing.
Ask a pack engineer who started out with an extruded plate. It works. Then the weight budget lands on the table, and the wall thickness that felt reassuring on the test bench starts looking expensive.
So what actually changes with a stamped plate?
Stamping forms thin Aluminum 3003 sheet into the flow channel. Extruded profiles get their channel pushed through a die. Machined plates have it cut out of solid aluminum. All three work — they just leave different amounts of metal behind, and that is where the differences buyers care about tend to show up.
Less material in the plate means less mass bolted onto the module, and across a full pack that adds up. Thin, even walls keep the distance between the cells and the coolant short and consistent, which helps hold the temperature spread tighter. And stamping, being a forming process, is generally more efficient at volume than cutting a channel out of a block — tooling tends to pay back faster on repeat orders.
Trumony Aluminum Limited — a Suzhou-based manufacturer of battery thermal management components and liquid cooling parts — builds a stamped cooling plate, model TR-20260227, in Aluminum 3003 with customized thickness and cooling efficiency, so the plate can be matched to a pack instead of the pack being matched to a plate. The same family covers a liquid cooling plate for EV (TR-20260225), energy storage system cooling plate (TR-20260226), liquid cooling plate for energy storage (TR-20260228) and cooling plate for power storage (TR-20260223). Aluminum's share of this market is no accident either — industry reporting puts aluminum-based cooling plates at roughly 64% of installations, on thermal conductivity and cost.
One caveat worth saying out loud: "durable" is a manufacturing question, not a process name. A stamped plate only holds up if channel depth, wall thickness and the joint — brazed or otherwise — suit the vibration and thermal cycling of the real application. That part comes down to tooling and quality control, not to the word on the spec sheet.
Trumony has spent 7 years on thermal management components, with a 100,000 m² facility and a 25-engineer R&D team working on cold plates and cooling tubes for EV, ESS and powertrain projects.
If you've moved from extruded or machined plates to stamped ones, which number moved first for you — the weight, the unit cost, or the thermal results? Curious what actually tipped the decision.