Study of heat dissipation for HXD2 locomotive's auxiliary converter

Modern AC traction locomotives, are characteristic of miniaturization, increasing switching frequency and increasing packaging densities, require increased current handling capability of packaged devices in applications related to power conversion. These ever-increasing demands pushed the efficiency of silicon semiconductor power-device to the limit. The heat dissipation in the power system must be taken into account. The temperature field of a product can be picked up to optimize the design and improve the reliability by the technology of thermal analysis in the phase of design. This paper describes results of thermal simulations in the module of HXD2 auxiliary converter with air cooling system. Integrated Thermal Analysis was conducted using the Flotherm and Icepak computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software packages. Influence of air-cooling system parameters on temperature distribution in module was also investigated. The optimized arrangement of the 6 power modules proved the results of thermal simulation of the auxiliary block.