CAD Modeling Based Thermal Analysis of 60-kW Universal Battery Supercharger (UBS)

Power electronics devices when operating at high power sometimes face performance issues due to poor thermal handling. The main goal of this work is to get an effective design for a cold plate to manage the thermal load for effective performance. The cold-plate design should be done such a way that it can deliver the required amount of power, reduces the semiconductor losses and keeps the junction temperature in the acceptable limit. The work started with designing the CAD model for the 60-kW Universal Battery Supercharger (UBS). Initially, two designs ‘V1.0 and V2.0’ were made. The first version V1.0 did not match the power density and hence, the final version V2.0 with both the factor satisfying was made. Hence, thermal analysis was done based on the second version V2.0. The thermal analysis was done initially using thermal and subsequently, using fluent packages of ANSYS. Once the modeling part was completed, for localized cooling of SiC module, the fin-based cold-plate design was made. With this fin-based cold-plate design, initial results were taken and based on the required performance, minor changes in the cold plate were made. After testing a total of six cold-plate designs with minor changes in it, the one with the most effective cooling was selected.