Thermal management of an IGBT module using two-phase cooling

Abstract

A lot of effort has been put to develop the next generation cooling technologies for Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor module of hybrid vehicles. Two phase cooling has been identified as a potential solution for cooling of such modules. This paper explores the viability and implementation of a two phase cooling scheme and its comparison with single phase cooling. For this inverter module of Toyota Prius consisting of 12 pairs of IGBT devices and diodes is used. Thermal simulation technique is used to study the effect of convective heat transfer coefficient, cold plate dimensions, total power on IGBT, thermal interface material and its thickness on the thermal performance of the module.