With the development of modern technology and the economy, environmental protection and sustainable development have become the focus of global attention. In this paper, the promotion and development of electric vehicles have bright prospects, and they are also facing many challenges. Under different operating conditions, various safety problems of electric vehicles emerge one after another, especially the potential safety hazards caused by battery overheating that threaten electric vehicles' development process. In this paper, a new indirect liquid cooling system is designed and optimized for cylindrical lithium-ion batteries. A variety of design schemes for different cooling channel structures and cooling liquid inlet direction are proposed, and the corresponding solid-fluid coupling model is established. COMSOL Multiphysics simulation software models, simulates and analyses cooling systems. An approximate model is constructed using the Kriging method,and it is considered to optimize the battery cooling system and improve the optimization results. Sensitivity parameter analysis and system structure optimization design are also carried out on the influencing factors of the battery thermal management. The results indicate it effectively balances and reduces the maximum core temperature and temperature difference of the battery pack. Compared with the original design, from the optimized design of these factors, which based on method of the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II), there is an excellent ability on the optimized thermal management system to dissipate thermal energy and keep the overall cooling uniformity of the battery and thermal management system. Furthermore, under thermal abuse conditions, the optimized system can also prevent thermal runaway propagation. In summary, this research is expected to provide some practical suggestions and ideas for the engineering and production applications and structural optimization design carried by electric vehicles.