DOE optimization of a liquid cold plate used in a thermal management system for power converters in the railway sector through 3D CFD analysis

Abstract

The thermal management system for power electronics is becoming a key factor in order to guarantee optimal working conditions, efficiency and safety of those components. In the field of liquid-cooled power electronics, the design of an optimal liquid cold plate (LCP) is fundamental to increase the heat transfer, minimizing the maximum temperature and the pressure drop. This work presents an optimization procedure of a finned extruded profile of an LCP for insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) power module, for railway propulsion. The optimization has been performed through DOE, by considering different values of several control factors (shape of the fin, length of the fin, pitch between the channels created by the fins), in order to minimize the LCP maximum temperature and the pressure drop between inlet and outlet. The combination of different values of control factors results in 18 prototypes, which have been compared using three-dimensional CFD simulations, performed in Ansys Fluent environment. The influence of parameters variation on the objective functions (i.e. maximum temperature of the liquid cold plate and pressure drop) has been verified.