Strut-Based Porous Media Heatsinks for High-Performance Power Electronics Thermal Management in Electrified Aircrafts

Abstract Multi-level inverters are one promising solution for high-power applications, enabling higher efficiency and improved power quality over conventional inverters. The emergence of these converter topologies with a larger number of topological switches makes reliable, forced and even natural convection air cooling a feasible option for aircraft power electronics. The need for high heat dissipation rate, robust design and lightweight heatsinks has led to the development of strut-based porous media structures for forced air cooling. The current work focuses on investigating Kelvin, Body-Centered Cubic (BCC) and Simple Cubic (SC) periodic open cellular structured (POCS) lattice heatsink with a fixed porosity and a fixed unit cell size. 3D printed Kelvin and SC heatsinks using AlSi10Mg material are tested in an air duct experimental setup along with a conventional LAM aluminium heatsink. The Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation model is validated with the experimental results and a 0D thermal model is developed using the CFD results. The CFD thermal results are in close accordance with the experimental results for the POCS heatsink within an error band of ±2%. The 0D results using the thermal data from CFD simulations also show a close comparison for the calculated semiconductor junction temperatures. The Kelvin heatsink performs the best thermally from the CFD analysis and has the least error when comparing the 0D and 3D-CFD results.