Investigation on weight consideration of liquid coolant system for power electronics converter in future aircraft

Filter design of high power density converter with weight, size and thermal considerations

“…The design challenges exist because of much different operating conditions than Si devices, and much research work on LCL filters has been reported, such as LCL filter designs for lower power (≤10 kW) lower switching frequency (≤ 10 kHz) [15,16] or high power (≥50 kW) low switching frequency (≤ 20 kHz) [17] converters. Therefore, the conventional passive filter design should be revisited because of high switching frequency, high power, and high operating temperature (70 o C) [18] requirements for MEA.…”

“…Heatsink design of an inverter is one of the key considerations for a high power and high efficiency converter [73]. Considering the high ambient temperature environment in aircraft and losses of SiC devices for high power applications, liquid cooling is an attractive option for thermal management of power electronic components [18] as well as high power density requirement [39]. For most applications, the cooling system operates at 5 -40 o C and ANSYS Fluent is chosen as the simulation tool for the heat sink design.…”

“…For most applications, the cooling system operates at 5 -40 o C and ANSYS Fluent is chosen as the simulation tool for the heat sink design. For aerospace applications with high ambient temperature environment, ANSYS Fluent analysis with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) will be co-simulated for heat sink design with different choices of coolants [18,74].…”

“…Considering the limit and the margin of the heatsink in Fig. 3.1 and the 150 o C junction temperature limit of the SiC module CAS120M12BM2 [18], the switching frequency of 60 kHz is found to be a suitable frequency for the HPDC system design. Hence, the selected switching frequency will be used for the LCL filter design.…”

“…Under the full-load operation of 50 kW, liquid cooling system has been found to be a potential method to improve power density in aerospace application [18,39]. Hence, for high power density requirements in aerospace application, air cooling alone is insufficient [18].…”