Air Cooling for High Temperature Power Electronics (Presentation)

Current emphasis on developing high-temperature power electronics, including wide-bandgap materials such as silicon carbide and gallium nitride, increases the opportunity for a completely air-cooled inverter at higher powers. This removes the liquid cooling system for the inverter, saving weight and volume on the liquid-to-air heat exchanger, coolant lines, pumps, and coolant, replacing them with just a fan and air supply ducting. We investigate the potential for an air-cooled heat exchanger from a component and systems-level approach to meet specific power and power density targets. A proposed baseline air-cooled heat exchanger design that does not meet those targets was optimized using a parametric computational fluid dynamics analysis, examining the effects of heat exchanger geometry and device location, fixing the device heat dissipation and maximum junction temperature. The CFD results were extrapolated to a full inverter, including casing, capacitor, bus bar, gate driver, and control board component weights and volumes. Surrogate ducting was tested to understand the pressure drop and subsequent system parasitic load. Geometries that met targets with acceptable loads on the system were down-selected for experimentation. Nine baseline configuration modules dissipated the target heat dissipation, but fell below specific power and power density targets. Six optimized configuration modules dissipated themore » target heat load, exceeding the specific power and power density targets. By maintaining the same 175 degrees C maximum junction temperature, an optimized heat exchanger design and higher device heat fluxes allowed a reduction in the number of modules required, increasing specific power and power density while still maintaining the inverter power.« less