Simulation and Optimization of Water-cooled Radiator with Pin-fins for IGBT Module

With the increasing power of insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) module, air-cooled radiator gradually becomes difficult to meet the thermal dissipation requirement of IGBT module. Water cooling radiator becomes an important means of heat dissipation with its excellent heat dissipation capability. Pin-fins structure is a common structure to improve the thermal dissipation effect of water cooling radiator. In this paper, a water cooled radiator with the pin-fins is simulated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to obtain the heat transfer and flowing property. Different parameters of pin-fins are studied to find the effect of the number and size of pin-fins on the thermal transfer performance and flow drag of radiator. It is found that the increase of pin-fins in both size and number showed a gradual slow -down in the improvement of heat transfer capacity. Meanwhile, the excessive size of pin-fins in the direction perpendicular to the flow direction would affect the performance of the radiator.