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The recent growth in electronics power density has created a significant need for effective thermal management solutions. Liquid-cooled heat sinks or cold plates are typically used to achieve high volumetric power density cooling. A natural trade-off exists between the thermal and hydraulic performance of a cold plate, creating an opportunity for design optimization. Current design optimization methods rely on computationally expensive and time consuming computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Here, we develop a rapid design optimization tool for liquid cooled heat sinks based on reduced order models for the thermal-hydraulic behavior. Flow layout is expressed as a combination of simple building blocks on a divided coarse grid. The flow layout and geometrical parameters are incorporated to optimize designs that can effectively address heterogeneous cooling requirements within electronics packages. We demonstrate that the use of population-based searches for optimal layout selection, while not ensuring a global optimum solution, can provide optimal or near-optimal results for most of test cases studied. The approach is shown to generate optimal designs within a timescale of 60-120 seconds. A case study based on cooling of a commercial silicon carbide (SiC) electronics power module is used to demonstrate the application of the developed tool and is shown to improve the performance as compared to an aggressive state-of-the-art single-phase liquid cooling solution by reducing the SiC junction-to-coolant thermal resistance by 25% for the same pressure drop.

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High power electronics are a key component in the electrification of aircraft. Large amounts of power need to be handled onboard to generate sufficient lift for flight. The transient nature of the aircraft's mission profile produces varied loading and environmental influences, making consistent cooling and device reliability difficult to maintain. Due to limitations in weight and performance metrics, the thermal management capability becomes a key inhibiting factor in preventing adoption of all electric aircraft. Many efforts are focused on the improvement of high-powered electronics such as the inverters, batteries, and motors, but there is a need for increased focus on the implications of each improved device on the total system with regards to thermal management. To address the many concerns for thermal management within aviation, this paper will review the prevalent factors of flight and couple them to their respective challenges to highlight the overarching effort needed to successfully integrate efficient electric propulsion devices with their protective thermal management systems. A review will be combined with a brief analytical study over inverter cooling to examine the effects of various transient parameters on the device temperature of an inverter in flight. The impact of failure in the cooling systems on the shutdown process will also be examined. Both studies are tied to the motivation for examining the impacts of new and transient challenges faced by electric power systems and help signify the importance of this focus as these systems become more present and capable within the aviation industry.