Passive immersion cooling as an alternative to thermal interface materials for thermal management of electric vehicle power converters
This study presents a comparative thermal analysis of two power converter configurations. The analysis was carried out in MATLAB Simscape and ANSYS Steady State Thermal. The comparison focuses on traditional air-cooled power converter design that use a Thermal Interface Materials (TIM) versus an oil...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis de maestría |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) |
| Repositorio: | UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC |
| Idioma: | inglés |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/444563 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/2117/444563 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Electric transformers -- Cooling Electric vehicles Electric power systems -- Cooling Transformadors elèctrics -- Refrigeració Vehicles elèctrics Sistemes de distribució d'energia elèctrica -- Refrigeració Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria electrònica |
| Sumario: | This study presents a comparative thermal analysis of two power converter configurations. The analysis was carried out in MATLAB Simscape and ANSYS Steady State Thermal. The comparison focuses on traditional air-cooled power converter design that use a Thermal Interface Materials (TIM) versus an oil-immersed configuration where TIMs is replace by dielectric oil. The focus is on the thermal management of the passive components (transformers) as they are the most difficult to cool with conventional methods and require the most complex thermal management strategies in the power converter under consideration used for high power density electronic applications. The key objective is to investigate how design choices affect the distribution of heat, particularly maximum temperatures across the transformer and heat dissipation pathways such as the thermal interface layer or the bottom oil layer. The focus of this study was on the transformers due to their complexity which make them ideal to build a base model for thermal management or other components. The study demonstrates that through surface optimization and fluid selection, it is possible to achieve minimal oil layer thickness and thermal conductance with reasonable thermal resistance and positions it as a viable alternative to thermal interface materials and thermal pads. The simulation results indicate that passive immersion cooling with oil leads to improved multi-directional heat transfer because of higher thermal conductivity and specific heat capacity of oil. Oil’s superior breakdown voltage also presents an additional advantage in preventing the risk of electrical arcing, which is a risk in the traditional cooling case where transformers are surrounded by air. The thermal resistance calculation also confirmed that the oil case had consistently lower Rth across all keys path, especially on the vertical sides while on the primary path (to the cold plate) its Rth was relatively similar in magnitude, signaling potential as a worthy solution to ensure temperature uniformity. |
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