Thermal Analysis and Optimization Design of Thermal Management Controller for Electric Trucks

To address the issue of performance degradation and potential failure of the thermal management controller in electric trucks caused by overheating of electronic components, this paper first analyzes the heat transfer mechanism of the controller from the hardware circuit design perspective, and then establishes a thermal model of the controller by adopting the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation method, and finally tests the validity and accuracy of the thermal model through the temperature test. The simulation results indicate that when the ambient temperature is 25°C, the maximum temperature of the electronic components exceeds the design limit of 60°C, and the maximum temperature of the controller reaches 76°C. Therefore, this paper further proposes heat dissipation optimization based on thermal model in three aspects: optimizing the design of printed circuit board (PCB) vias, changing the PCB substrate material, and adding heat sink. These methods effectively reduce the maximum temperature of the controller to within the design limit of 60°C, significantly enhancing the reliability and safety of the controller during operation.