Computer-Aided Thermal Analysis of an Electric-Vehicle Universal Battery Supercharger

The goal of this work is to realize an effective design of a cold plate to manage the device thermal load of an electric-vehicle (EV) universal battery supercharger (UBS). The cold-plate design ensures reduced peak temperatures of the semiconductor dies and the modules and temperature variation among the modules thereby reducing the device losses. Our work initiated with the design of a computer-aided-design (CAD) model for a 60-kW SiC UBS. The thermal analysis was conducted using Thermal and Fluent packages of ANSYS. After the modeling, a fin-based cold-plate design was carried out for localized cooling of SiC modules. Subsequently, several cold-plate geometries were pursued eventually finalizing one design that yielded the most effective cooling.