Improving the cooling performance of power modules by using anisotropic materials

Inhalt:
Power modules are used for various applications such as automobiles and industrial equipment. It is important to improve cooling performance of the power modules, since the cooling performance determines high performance and miniaturization of the power modules. We investigated whether the cooling performance of the power modules can be improved with anisotropic materials by performing computer simulation. We found that the cooling performance can be significantly improved by applying multiple anisotropic-material layers to the power modules and by alternating high thermal-conductivity directions of the anisotropic-material layers.