Compact Liquid Cooling Module Incorporating Metal Foam and Fin Hybrid Structures for High Power IGBTs

We propose a high-performance thermal management solution for high power density IGBT modules applied to electric vehicles. The suggested thermal management module includes the plenum-manifold structure combined with a porous layer to achieve high heat transfer performance with a low pressure drop. We investigated two types of configuration. For the first configuration (named as Type 1), thin Cu porous layer with porosity range between 75 ~ 95% was applied. For the second configuration (named as Type 2), pin-fin structures were incorporated within the porous layer. The results obtained with Type 1 showed that the best cooling performance occurred around porosity 85% due to the conflict between the conduction and convection. The lowest thermal resistance was found to be ~0.21 K/W. With Type 2 configuration, thermal resistance was further reduced by ~6%, which implied that the improvement of the conduction due to the fin structure is higher than the degradation of the convection associated with internal flow reduction. The lowest thermal resistance was obtained to be ~0.18 K/W with 10 kPa inlet pressure. Our module could provide a low thermal resistance with significantly reduced pressure drop compared with previously reported works.