Abstract
Thermal management of power electronics continues to be one of the limiting factors in the peak power capability of the traction inverter system and overall efficiency of the e-drive. Successful design and implementation of Embedded Microchannels with a 3D-Manifold Cooler, or EMMC, could enable higher power density that allows increase in the inverter peak power output. In the present work, we have conducted a parametric study on geometric dimensions of the EMMCs to analyze thermofluidic performance by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The study was conducted for a 5 mm × 5 mm cold-plate foot print, heat flux 800 W/cm2, and single-phase water as working fluid at inlet temperature of 25 °C. We implemented strategies such as i) symmetric distribution of manifold inlet/outlet conduits, ii) reducing the thickness of cold-plate substrate, iii) increasing fluid-solid interfacial area in cold-plate microchannels that resulted in reduction in thermal resistance of the baseline EMMC design from 0.1 to 0.04 cm2-K/W with pressure drop from 8 to 37 kPa.
