An Enhanced Cooling Method for Power Modules on All-Electric Ships Based on Parameter Optimization and Special-Shaped Design of Sintered Heat Pipes

This paper proposes an enhanced cooling method for multi-chip power modules (e.g., in MMC inverters) with uneven power loss in all-electric propulsion ships based on sintered heat pipe parameter optimization and special-shaped design. First, five key parameters of straight sintered heat pipes were optimized: placement directly under hotspot chips, 10 mm in diameter, quantity matching the number of hotspot chips, length equal to the heatsink side length, and direction perpendicular to heatsink fins. Then, a C-shaped heat pipe was designed using the parallel thermal resistance principle, which forms two parallel low-thermal-resistance paths and outperforms conventional U-shaped ones. Finite element simulations showed that the hotspot temperature of the conventional heatsink was 91.26 °C, while it dropped to 87.35 °C with optimized straight heat pipes and further to 80.85 °C with C-shaped ones. Experiments verified an 11.65% temperature reduction (from 86.7 °C of conventional heatsinks to 76.6 °C of C-shaped heat pipe heatsinks). This method effectively lowers hotspot temperatures, reduces device failure rates, improves the thermal reliability of power modules, and provides a generalized design methodology for heatsinks of various power electronic converters.