Advanced Liquid Cooling for a Traction Drive Inverter Using Jet Impingement and Microfinned Enhanced Surfaces Preprint S.K
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Advanced Liquid Cooling for a Traction Drive Inverter Using Jet Impingement and Microfinned Enhanced Surfaces Preprint S.K. Waye, S. Narumanchi, M. Mihalic, G. Moreno, K. Bennion, and J. Jeffers Presented at ITherm 2014 Orlando, Florida May 27 – 30, 2014 NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. Conference Paper NREL/CP-5400-61060 August 2014 Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308 NOTICE The submitted manuscript has been offered by an employee of the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (Alliance), a contractor of the US Government under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. 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Waye, Sreekant Narumanchi, Mark Mihalic, Gilbert Moreno, Kevin Bennion, Jana Jeffers National Renewable Energy Laboratory 15013 Denver West Parkway Golden, Colorado 80401 Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION This study evaluates a jet impingement based cooling With the increasing trend towards miniaturization and strategy combined with microfinned enhanced surfaces as a advancements in devices, thermal management of power means of improving thermal management for power electronic electronics is becoming more challenging. With more power devices. For comparison, a baseline channel flow heat passing through smaller areas, the heat flux increases and exchanger and jet impingement on plain surfaces are necessitates more aggressive cooling to maintain device characterized. The jets, augmented with enhanced microfinned operational temperatures. Reducing the component costs and surfaces, provide localized cooling to areas heated by the allowing for increased power density and specific power are insulated-gate bipolar transistors and diode devices. Lighter key objectives of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced materials and simpler manufacturing while managing required Power Electronics and Electric Motors Program. The program pumping power increase the overall performance while targets are intended to increase market penetration of hybrid- reducing weight, volume, and cost. Computational fluid electric and all-electric vehicles. dynamics modeling validated by experiments was used to The objective of this work is to design, develop, characterize the baseline as well as jet-impingement-based characterize, and demonstrate a light-weight, low-cost, heat exchangers at typical automotive flow rates using a 50%– inverter-scale (based on a commercially available inverter), 50% mixture by volume of water and ethylene glycol. The single-phase liquid-cooled heat exchanger that is a significant three cooling configurations were tested at full inverter power improvement over conventional channel-flow-based heat (40 to 100 kW output power) on a dynamometer. An increased exchangers. The purpose is to use a conventional coolant thermal performance was observed for the jet-impingement (water-ethylene glycol [WEG]) to maintain existing cooling configurations. Experiments were also performed to architecture while improving thermal management of the investigate the long-term reliability of the jets impinging on inverter. enhanced surfaces. In previous work, we developed a first prototype [1] that KEY WORDS: jet-impingement, enhanced surfaces, showed promising thermal improvements using a submerged microfinned surfaces, single-phase liquid cooling, power liquid jet-impingement array, but with an increase in the electronics, inverter thermal management, heat transfer pumping power. A second prototype was designed, fabricated, and tested. The results from this second prototype will be NOMENCLATURE compared to the first jet-based prototype as well as the CFD computational fluid dynamics baseline channel flow configuration. DBA direct-bond-aluminum General studies of single-phase liquid jets are extensive in DBC direct-bond-copper the literature [2-5], including experimental, theoretical, and IGBT insulated gate bipolar transistor numerical approaches. Different configurations of impinging P pressure, Pa jets have been studied, including single free-surface jets [6], Q heat, W multiple free-surface jets [7-10], single submerged jets [6, 11, R resistance, K/W 12], multiple submerged jets [7, 10, 11, 13], and confined T temperature, K or ºC single submerged jets [4, 14-16]. Both planar and circular jets V volumetric flow rate have been studied. WEG water-ethylene glycol coolant For power electronics cooling applications, a large number of experimental correlations have been developed for the local Subscripts and average heat transfer coefficients for impinging jets on the avg average surface of a simulated chip [3-5], usually 10-mm by 10-mm or hx heat exchanger 12.7–mm by 12.7-mm in area. Further parametric and j junction optimization study examined potential improvements [17]. j-l junction to liquid coolant Ndao et al. [18] compare single and multiple submerged jet- l liquid coolant impingement cooling strategies for electronics cooling with max maximum other technologies such as parallel micro-channel, in-line and th thermal staggered circular pin-fin, and offset strip-fin heat exchangers. Jet impingement combined with a mini-channel heat exchanger or flows through narrow gaps has also been investigated [19, 20]. Skuriat and Johnson [21] discuss direct 1 This report is available at no cost from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at www.nrel.gov/publications. cooling on an aluminum nitride substrate with two insulated The first prototype replaced the channel flow configuration gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) and two diode dies. Of high with jets that impinge on the module surfaces. The flow path interest is cooling of wide band-gap devices, including gallium remained similar to that of the baseline design. The jets nitride devices, because maximum junction temperatures can increased the overall pressure drop, so the second prototype, be higher than silicon devices, and this was recently examined shown in Fig. 1, removed unnecessary flow path to reduce the by Bhunia et al. [22]. pressure drop back to levels similar to the channel-flow Air jets have also been studied extensively [11]. Some of baseline. The first prototype used screwed in nozzles while the the non-dimensional heat transfer correlations developed from second prototype implemented plates with drilled holes studies on air jets [11] can also be applied to liquid jets. serving as nozzles. The nozzles are 1.4 mm in diameter. Note Researchers have explored the impact of a vast array of eight nozzles in each nozzle plate. Each power module parameters such as jet velocity, jet diameter, impact angle, contains 8 diodes and 8 IGBTs. Each nozzle is located nearly nozzle-to-chip spacing, nozzle-to-nozzle spacing, turbulence under the center of a diode or IGBT. Parts of the manifold levels, nozzle shapes, nozzle length, jet pulsations, jet have been omitted from fabrication for ease of testing. The jet confinement, chip-surface enhancement, and fluid properties impingement cooling approach eliminates the use of thermal on the chip-surface heat transfer coefficients. All these are interface material between the base plate and the heat covered in detail in comprehensive reviews and studies