Abstract
Optimal heat dissipation in power modules can significantly increase their power density. Removing the generated heat is critical for capturing the benefits of advanced semiconductor materials and improving the reliability of the device operation. This study proposes a design optimization method for liquid-cooled heat sinks that use a Fourier analysis-based tool and an evolutionary optimization algorithm to optimize the heat sink geometry for specified objectives. The optimized heat sink geometry was compared with state-of-the-art solutions in the literature based on finite element analysis of different designs. The proposed methodology can develop complex geometries that outperform conventional heat sink geometries. Optimized heat sink design from the proposed method was fabricated and tested in an experimental setup under representative operating conditions. The experimental setup was also modeled in the finite element model that was used for the proposed heat sink optimization method. The experimental results show that developed finite element models can predict the thermal and flow performance of the complex design with high fidelity, and the results validate the proposed design approach.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 559-569 |
| Number of pages | 11 |
| Journal | IEEE Open Journal of Power Electronics |
| Volume | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Funding
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Vehicle Technologies Office Electric Drive Technologies Program. The authors thank Ms. Susan Rogers of DOE for her support and guidance, Jon Wilkins and Randy Wiles at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for CAD design and developing the experimental setup. Part of this publication was presented at 2020 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE) in Detroit, Michigan, USA, with the title, Fourier Analysis-Based Evolutionary Multi-Objective Multiphysics Optimization of Liquid-Cooled Heat Sinks. doi:10.1109/ECCE44975.2020.9235943 This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under Contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan.
Keywords
- Evolutionary algorithms
- heat sink
- multi-objective optimization
- power module
- thermal management