The independent claim is where the value lives, and in CATL's grant US11498451B2, "Thermal management method for battery pack" (issued November 15, 2022), the value is a method rather than a heat-exchanger. The CPC makes this explicit: B60L 58/12, 58/26 and 58/27 cover battery state and thermal management, G01R 31/3648 covers state estimation, and H01M 10/625 covers heating/cooling. The claim ties a thermal action to a battery-state determination — manage temperature based on what the pack's state signals say.
That state-driven framing is the novelty. Cooling a pack is ancient prior art; conditioning the thermal control on an estimated state (charge, health, or a derived thermal-risk signal) is the defensible step. The presence of G01R 31/3648 — battery state estimation — inside a thermal-management claim is the tell that the method closes a loop between sensing the pack's condition and acting on its temperature, rather than running an open-loop cooling schedule.
Coming from CATL, the world's largest EV-cell manufacturer, the precision is unsurprising and the strategic intent is clear. A cell maker that also wants to own the pack-level controls layer extends its position from chemistry into systems. A method claim like this is portable across the many automakers CATL supplies, which makes it more valuable than a claim tied to one vehicle's hardware. Method claims travel; hardware claims do not.
On scope, the caution is that method claims can be harder to enforce than hardware claims because infringement happens in software behavior that is not visible from the outside. The dependent claims that specify the exact state signal and the exact thermal response are what give this teeth. Dated November 2022, as thermal management became a fast-charge and safety battleground, CATL's move to claim the state-to-thermal control loop is a well-aimed extension of its portfolio up the stack.