Two-Phase Liquid Cooling for Thermal Management of IGBT Power Electronic Module

Recent trends including rapid increases in the power ratings and continued miniaturization of semiconductor devices have pushed the heat dissipation of power electronics well beyond the range of conventional thermal management solutions, making control of device temperature a critical issue in the thermal packaging of power electronics. Although evaporative cooling is capable of removing very high heat fluxes, two-phase cold plates have received little attention for cooling power electronics modules. In this work, device-level analytical modeling and system-level thermal simulation are used to examine and compare single-phase and two-phase cold plates for a specified inverter module, consisting of 12 pairs of silicon insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) devices and diodes. For the conditions studied, an R134a-cooled, two-phase cold plate is found to substantially reduce the maximum IGBT temperature and spatial temperature variation, as well as reduce the pumping power and flow rate, in comparison to a conventional single-phase water-cooled cold plate. These results suggest that two-phase cold plates can be used to substantially improve the performance, reliability, and conversion efficiency of power electronics systems.