Cold Plate Tool Development for Power Electronics in Aerospace Applications

Abstract

Due to increasing power demands and decreasing component size, thermal management has become the bottleneck for many power electronic applications. The aerospace industry has seen a focus on reducing weight, operating temperature, and pumping power of power converters, since these will limit an aircrafts' range and load carrying capacity. This paper outlines a tool which was created in MATLAB to automate the cold plate design process for DC-DC converters. The tool incorporates parametric sweeps for both staggered and aligned pin fin configurations to find the optimal design which maintains the devices below their critical junction temperature while reducing overall weight, and pumping power of the system. Using this design tool, an initial thermal design can be proposed with an acceptable trade-off of all critical parameters. Design time can be reduced by using this tool to propose a baseline design, which can be refined afterwards.