High-Performance Cooling for Power Electronics via Electrochemical Additive Manufacturing

The rise in adoption of electric vehicles has driven rapid development of traction inverter components. The advanced SiC and GaN devices used in these inverters have high power densities, creating a thermal management challenge and, therefore, issues with device performance and reliability. This paper introduces an advanced liquid-cooled thermal management solution for power electronics. Utilizing a novel 3-D metal printing technology called electrochemical additive manufacturing (ECAM), copper cooling structures are printed directly onto the ceramic substrate of the component, thereby eliminating thermal interface materials and significantly reducing the thermal resistance of the system-level stack. Additionally, improving fin efficiency and heat transfer through high surface area, triply periodic minimal surface cooling structures is demonstrated. The use of ECAM-printed cooling structures in traction inverter applications is shown to have great potential for realizing significant gains in performance, via thermal resistance improvements in the range of 60%–120%.