Embedded thermal management solution for power electronics PCB using additive manufacturing

Abstract

Thermal management for power electronics is gaining lot of attention over the recent years due to the harsh environmental requirements of electro-mechanical system usage. Conventional thermal solutions for power electronics using passive & active cooling techniques like heat sinks and fans are effective and cost efficient. But the new systems require highly power dense packaging design, which in turn makes the design engineers to opt for novel, smaller & lightweight thermal solutions. This paper focusses on the research work conducted to design and develop an embedded thermal management solution for a low power electronics PCB using additive manufacturing technique. Embedded thermal management materials used for this study are flat heat pipes, pyrolytic graphite sheets and dual cool jets. In addition to understanding the thermal performance of the above mentioned combination of materials, a technique to manufacture the PCB with customized embedded thermal solutions is also proposed in this paper. In order to prove the performance of the idea proposed, thermal and CFD simulations were done for different combination of designs. Also to validate the simulations results an experimental setup of a particular power electronics application was tested with the heat pipes and graphite sheets using thermal camera.