A Comprehensive Review on the Core Thermal Management Improvement Concepts in Power Electronics

A heat sink is a specific type of heat exchanger integrated with heat generating devices – mostly electronics – for the sake of thermal management. In the design procedure of heat sinks, several considerations such as manufacturing cost, reliability, thermal and hydraulic performance have to be included. In the past few decades, the prevailing trend of electronics design miniaturization has led to high-power-density systems necessitating high performance cooling concepts. This paper intends to provide a comprehensive review on various employed heat transfer enhancement techniques in cooling procedures of electronics thermal management devices, with a focus on core ideas. The main motivation is to give a rapid overview on the key concepts in different high-performance cooling designs along with a quantitative comparison between the different concepts all in one reference which is missing in literature. For this, the key idea of each design is firstly categorized, and then a detailed description is provided for each case. The discussed categories consist of concepts based on channel cooling in various scales, phase transition, jet impingement, spray cooling and hybrid design. At the end, quantitative comparison is illustrated for thermal and hydraulic performance of a selection of the reviewed references covering all these different categories. Based on this comparison, an overview on thermo-hydraulic performance of the presented categories is provided, and recommendations for future studies are given based on this and the detailed review of references.