Parametric study of a cold plate for electronic systems cooling

Abstract

The International Maritime Organization’s goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by around 2050 made full electric ships draw attention as a means to achieve this target. Effective thermal management systems are crucial for electric ships to dissipate heat and prevent overheating of critical components. The present study aims to investigate the effect of geometric and non-geometric variables on the technical viability of a cold plate intended to cool a Power Electronics Building Block. A combination of four open-source software packages and one transport properties library was used to simulate the effect of four decision variables on five measures of merit. One design was considered with a novel S-type pipe shape and different values for the plate aspect ratio, radius ratio of the pipe, flow pressure loss, and plate mass. Results show that increasing plate mass and allowable pressure loss significantly reduce global thermal resistance and exergy destruction. Temperature distribution and usable area are highly sensitive to the geometric configuration. The proposed design index effectively captures the trade-off between thermal performance and system-level constraints, including weight and pumping power. The study recommends increasing decision variable values, but the best configuration ranking depends on the chosen measure of merit.