Innovative conduction cooling for high-power-density converters

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Power converters play a key role in converting electric power to power all types of electrical loads in the world. Thermal management is essential to the reliability of power converters as excessive temperatures of the critical components such as transformers and semiconductors are the primary causes of failures in power converters. Nowadays the thermal management of power converters is becoming extremely challenging due to the increasing demand for high power density. Alpha Technologies Ltd. (ATL), the preeminent total power solutions provider, is planning to further increase the product reliability of their high-power-density rectifiers by replacing the active cooling with passive cooling. ATL desires a new and innovative thermal management strategy, which is mainly based on heat conduction and can maintain all components within their safe temperature limits Dr. Li's Electronics Cooling & Multiphase Flows Lab and Drs. Eberle and Wang's Power Electrics Lab at UBC Okanagan will collaborate with ATL to develop the conduction-based passive cooling for ATL's power modules. The project will be conducted both experimentally and numerically. The project will involve multiphysics modeling of magnetic components and detailed thermal analyses at the levels of power module and magnetic components. Innovative concepts of thermal management will be investigated and developed to address the thermal challenges for magnetic components. The developed technology will be tested and transferred to ATL. The proposed project will open up great potential of applying passive-cooling thermal design in high-power-density converters. This is highly important for power industry to meet the power requirements for a variety of system applications with the highest efficiency and reliability. The project fits into Canada's agenda to support industry competitiveness as the research will enhance Canada's competitiveness in the global industry of power electronics.