Multidisciplinary Cooling Design Tool for Electric Vehicle SiC Inverters Utilizing Transient 3D-CFD Computations

This paper proposes a new design tool that can be used for the development of a proper cooling component for high-power three-phase SiC module-packs for electric vehicles. Specifically, a multidisciplinary approach of the design process is presented that is based on the accurate electrical, thermal and fluid-mechanics modeling as well as computational testing of a high-power three-phase SiC modulepack under transient-load conditions, so that it can effectively meet the highly-demanding cooling requirements of an electric vehicle inverter. The cooling plate is initially designed by using steady-statebased 3D-computational-fluid-dynamic (CFD) tool, as in a conventional method. Then, the proposed design algorithm fine-tunes it through transient 3D-CFD computations by following a specific iterative improvement procedure considering the heat dissipation requirements for the SiC power switchesduring the official driving cycles for passenger vehicles and during abrupt acceleration tests under several ambient environments. Therefore, not only overheating at all operating conditions is avoided, but also, accurate thermal modeling of the individual inverter modules is provided that can be used forlifetime estimations and for calculating the overload capability of the inverter. The design improvement attained with the proposed procedure against the conventional steady-state approach is validated on a traction 450 A SiC inverter with the model of a real passenger vehicle

Design, modelling and evaluation of a GaN based motor drive for a solar car

In recent years, electrical vehicle (EV) starts showing its unique advantages that the conventional combustion vehicles do not have. Together with the increasing interests on EV, the motor drive with higher efficiency and lighter weight also becomes more attractive. A promising solution is to apply the wide band gap (WBG) components including gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) in the motor drive. Thus, the performance of the GaN, SiC and Si based motor drive in this application are compared. Besides, as the current maximum current rating of the GaN and SiC MOSFET is limited and insufficient to satisfy the large phase current in the acceleration and braking process, the inverter topology that adds the parallel MOSFETs in one position is considered. To reduce the time and cost for the development, this paper proposes the modelling of the motor drive, with which the voltage and current stress, power loss, thermal and electromagnetic performance can all be evaluated. The modelling to be introduced consists of the 1-D power loss, simplified thermal modelling of the motor drive and the 3-D modelling of the electromagnetic performance, detailed thermal performance of the motor drive. In the 3-D modelling, to make the heat transfer simulation closer to the realistic, computational fluid dynamic (CFD) is used to evaluated the heat transfer coefficient on the surface with forced air-cooling.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care  Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.DC systems, Energy conversion & Storag