Thermal Performance Analysis of a Liquid Cooling Plate for Power Electronics

The need for effective cooling methods has become very critical because of the miniaturization and increasing heat flux density in power electronics equipment. The power electronics systems must have good thermal management engineering for efficiency and safe operation. Due to increasing heat loads, liquid cooling options are more preferred than the air cooling solutions. In this study, thermal performance of a liquid cooling plate is investigated by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools. Different flow path configurations are examined for homogeneous and effective cooling of power electronics equipments with high power density. The pressure losses, surface temperatures and thermal resistances at different coolant flow rates are computed and compared together. Moreover, the influence of the cooling channel height and width on the thermal thermal performance is analyzed.