This work reports the experimental demonstration of active thermal control of an Li-ion battery module. Corresponding simulations based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) were also performed to analyze the experimental data. Active control strategies were designed to exploit reciprocating cooling flows to achieve optimal cooling effectiveness, in terms of controlled maximum temperature rise, temperature uniformity among cells, and reduced parasitic power consumption. This work first describes the development of an experimental facility to demonstrate the active control. Second, a CFD model was developed and validated using experimental data. Based on the experimental facility and the CFD model, a number of different cooling schemes and control strategies were investigated. Both the experimental and CFD results suggest that a combined use of hysteresis control and reciprocating cooling flow can achieve the optimal cooling performance among all the strategies investigated. Such a combined strategy dramatically reduced the parasitic power by 84% and cooling air consumed by the cooling system, improved the temperature uniformity among cells, and only with a tradeoff of a slightly increased maximum cell temperature rise. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.