Design of Liquid Cooled Pin–Fin Heat Sink for High Voltage Electric Vehicle

Abstract

Nowadays, designing and development of more efficient Electric Vehicles (EVs) have attracted worldwide attention. The major challenges of Electric Vehicles (EVs) are limited battery life, long charging time problems and limitation on driving range per charge. However, higher power density and higher power electric systems using power modules (SiC MOSFET/IGBT) can compensate for these challenges. But these power modules in the inverter of EV are sensitive to high temperature which may cause damage to the devices. In order to avoid this problem, an efficient cooling system has to be incorporated. The main objective of this work is to study the performance of liquid cooled Pin–Fin heat sink for an inverter by changing number and size of Pins and Mass Flow Rate of the liquid. The power loss for continuous load is estimated based on design calculations subsequently initial heat sink model is designed. The different heat sink models are developed and CFD analysis is conducted on each design. Final geometry is checked with a mass flow rate of 14.82 L/min. All the designs are done using Spaceclaim, and CFD analysis is conducted using ANSYS Fluent which is included in ANSYS products.