Designing Thermally Uniform Heatsink with Rectangular Pins for High-Power Automotive SiC Inverters
Paper in proceeding, 2020

This paper presents the design of a high-performance liquid-cooled heatsink for three-phase automotive inverters that attains uniform thermal distribution at the surface of the three power modules. Power modules with SiC-MOSFETs are used in this study and a uniform thermal distribution on the heatsink guarantees equal thermal loading of the semiconductor devices. A comparative study of various cooling plate geometries is made and their effectiveness in meeting the design objectives of low sink-temperature and coolant pressure drop and the highest possible temperature uniformity along the surface of the plate is presented. Plates with straight and wavy fins are compared with designs accommodating rectangular pins and the advantages of each case is shown with the corresponding simulation results. Key design parameters of the cooling plate geometries are optimized with an iterative process, which is presented with selective simulation results of 3D Conjugate Heat Transfer computations for coolant flow rates up to 10~l/min. The final heatsink design accommodates multiple rectangular pins and attains temperature difference of less than 2oC among the three SiC power modules.

Temperature uniformity

SiC MOSFET

Liquid cooling

Conjugate heat transfer

Three-phase inverter

Electric drive

Author

Georgios Mademlis

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Engineering

Raik Orbay

Volvo Cars

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Engineering

Yujing Liu

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Engineering

Nimananda Sharma

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Engineering

IECON Proceedings (Industrial Electronics Conference)

Vol. 2020-October 1317-1322 9254692
9781728154145 (ISBN)

IECON 2020 - 46th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
Singapore, Singapore,

iTEM - Integrated Transmission and Electric Motor

Swedish Energy Agency (45622-1), 2018-02-09 -- 2020-09-30.

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Transport

Subject Categories

Vehicle Engineering

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/IECON43393.2020.9254692

More information

Latest update

6/3/2021 1