Potential Disruptive Manufacturing Method for Heat Management of Power Electronics

摘要

Do you want to continue innovating? If you have a potential application, contact Jan at jan.depauw@valcun.be to evaluate which benefit ValCUN can provide to your company (which could lead to a free demo or prototype part). ValCUN aims to serve its customers by providing design optimization for MMD/AM and production of fully finished products. We live in a society in which we strive for higher performance and efficiency in everything around us. Computers go to a 5nm process, supercomputers do 415.5 petaflops and electric cars aim for a range of 1000km. From a technological point of view, these evolutions usually require more power and are preferably build in a smaller geometry. Combining the latter inevitably leads to higher energy densities resulting in high temperature and temperature hotspots. Traditional cooling solutions such as air cooling with extruded aluminium profile are no longer sufficient. There is a need for more efficient cooling to maintain our technological progress. Cooling with a liquid instead of air provides 10x to 100x better thermal transfer. A generative optimized design of the heat sink can increase the efficiency by a factor of two or more. This design is typically a complex geometry that is hard to be produced economically by traditional techniques such as milling, die casting or extrusion. The demands have pushed the manufacturing methods to their limits. The best alternative would be additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing.