Comprehensive Analysis of the Impact of Serial and Parallel Cooling on the Thermal Performance of Power Semiconductor Modules

Abstract:
A comparison between serial and parallel cooling strategies for consecutive power semiconductor modules was demonstrated by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). In the analysis, two different cooling structures were taken into consideration, namely pin fin distribution and meandering channels. All case studies were performed in the scope of the RoadPak eMobility module. The analysis showed that, generally, serial configurations with optimized designs can offer reasonably better thermal performance than equivalent parallel configurations due to the improved usage of the available flow rate. Lastly, the impact of temperature differences between chips on the current sharing is analyzed by means of electro-thermal simulations and infrared thermography measurements.