An effective battery thermal management (BTM) system is required for lithium-ion batteries to ensure a desirable operating temperature range with minimal temperature gradient, and thus to guarantee their high efficiency, long lifetime and great safety. In this paper, a heat pipe and wet cooling combined BTM system is developed to handle the thermal surge of lithium-ion batteries during high rate operations. The proposed BTM system relies on ultra-thin heat pipes which can efficiently transfer the heat from the battery sides to the cooling ends where the water evaporation process can rapidly dissipate the heat. Two sized battery packs, 3 Ah and 8 Ah, with different lengths of cooling ends are used and tested through a series high-intensity discharges in this study to examine the cooling effects of the combined BTM system, and its performance is compared with other four types of heat pipe involved BTM systems and natural convection cooling method. A combination of natural convection, fan cooling and wet cooling methods is also introduced to the heat pipe BTM system, which is able to control the temperature of battery pack in an appropriate temperature range with the minimum cost of energy and water spray. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.