Aggressive demands for high power density and low-cost power modules in the automotive sector pose significant challenges to the thermal management systems. These challenges necessitate adopting highly effective cooling technologies in power modules to remain competitive in the semiconductor industry. Furthermore, the thermal management strategy must be simple, easy to integrate, compact, effective, efficient, reliable, and economical. This thesis is an effort to investigate the impact of fin geometry on the overall performance of finned-type liquid-cooled power electronic modules in electrified transportation. The cooling system's performance metrics, including thermal resistance, pressure drop, pumping power, and mass, are discussed in depth. Various cooling technologies are benchmarked. The finned-type cooling technique is chosen over other methods due to simplicity and low pressure drop. Integrated cooling or direct cooling of the module’s baseplate is selected due to considerable thermal resistance reduction because of thermal grease elimination. Potential fabrication techniques are thoroughly explored and compared in terms of mass production and prototyping suitability. Four different fin shapes, including circular (baseline), drop-shaped, symmetric convex lens, and offset strip in the staggered arrangement, are studied herein. The cooling agent is Water and Ethylene Glycol 50% volumetric mixture (WEG 50%). Typical operating conditions in electrified vehicles (EVs) such as flow rate and inlet temperature are assumed for the numerical analysis. A grid convergence study is carried out to ensure numerical solutions are within an acceptable error band. The thermal performance evaluation results showed that, on average, offset strip, drop-shaped, and the convex lens performed 39%, 20%, and 6% better than the baseline design, respectively. Additionally, the design candidates are compared in terms of mass and estimated machining cost. The results of the baseline case are verified against empirical correlations from the literature. The maximum deviation is less than 1% and 1.2% for finned-surface temperature and pressure drop, respectively. The difference is attributed to the end-wall effects. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

The automotive market is currently undergoing a historical change where stricter emission legislations and ever increasing fuel costs have intensified the search for effective alternatives to the conventional internal combustion engine, which has resulted in a substantial trend towards electrification of powertrains. Storage of electrical energy is the fundamental component in this technology where the lithium-ion batteries are currently considered as the most appropriate solution. Lithium-ion batteries, however, as other types of batteries, can only be used efficiently and durably within a specific temperature range.This Master thesis has been carried out in collaboration with Electroengine in Sweden AB, situated in Uppsala, which has an ongoing project regarding development of a modular battery system for electric powertrains. The project is at a stage where an initial prototype has been developed which provides the foundation for this thesis. The study has addressed the battery system performance from a thermal perspective, in order to validate the ability of the system to create a thermally serviceable environment for the lithium-ion battery cells. The work has therefore been focused on verifying whether the existing structure provides sufficient heating and cooling functions. Based on the validation review, the current prototype's performance is presented and suggestions for improvements are submitted.Knowledge in the relevant area has been acquired through an extensive pre study concerning competing temperature management systems, basic thermodynamics, potential pathways for heat transfer and temperature-related characteristics for battery cells. Further, testing was conducted to obtain cell-generated heat power at varying load, state of charge and temperature. Henceforth the test data was used for the creation of simulation models in (COMSOL, 2012) and numerical analysis in (MATLAB, 2011) regarding the battery system's thermal behavior for various operating conditions in order to verify the system's temperature-regulating sustainability and to design the required cooling and heating functions.The conclusion of the study indicates that the existing design possesses acceptable dimensioning of cooling and heating properties. For further development of the battery system's temperature regulatory functions, a number of system improvement measures are necessary. Prioritized improvements are adaptive cooling which is only activated when needed, and cooling through the connecting plates of the battery cells. Implementation of improvement measures will result in an extended lifespan of the battery cells, and higher overall efficiency of the battery system. / Fordonsmarknaden genomgår idag en historisk förändring där striktare utsläppslagstiftningar och ständigt ökande bränslekostander har intensifierat sökandet efter effektiva alternativ till den konventionella förbränningsmotorn, vilket medfört en omfattande trend mot elektrifiering av drivlinor. Lagring av elektrisk energi utgör den fundamentala komponenten inom denna teknologi där litium-jon-batterier idag anses som den mest adekvata lösningen. Litium-jon-batterier är dock, såsom andra typer av batterier, temperatursensibla och kan endast brukas effektivt och durabelt inom ett specifikt temperaturområde.Detta examensarbete har genomförts i samarbete med Electroengine in Sweden AB i Uppsala som har ett pågående projekt där ett modulärt batterisystem för elektriska drivlinor utvecklas. Projektet befinner sig i ett stadie där en initial prototyp framtagits vilken utgör fundamentet för ifrågavarande examensarbete. Genomförd studie har behandlat batterisystemets prestanda ur ett termiskt perspektiv med syfte att validera systemets förmåga att skapa en termiskt tjänlig miljö för ingående litium-jon-battericeller. Arbetet har följaktligen fokuserats på att verifiera huruvida den befintliga konstruktionen tillgodoser satisfierande värmnings- och kylningsfunktioner. Utifrån valideringsgranskningen har den befintliga prototypens prestanda presenterats och förbättringsförslag framlagts.Via en omfattande förstudie berörande konkurrerande temperaturhanteringsystem, grundläggande termodynamik, potentiella vägar för värmetransport och battericellernas temperaturrelaterade egenskaper inhämtades en solid kunskapsbas inom berört område. Vidare genomfördes tester för erhållande av cellgenererad värmeeffekt vid varierande last, laddningsstatus och temperatur. Fortsättningsvis brukades testdata för upprättande av simuleringsmodeller i (COMSOL, 2012) och numerisk analys i (MATLAB, 2011) gällande batterisystemets termiska beteende för olika driftförhållanden för att därigenom verifiera systemets temperaturreglerande bärkraftighet och dimensionera erforderlig kylning och värmning.Slutsaten av genomförd studie är att den befintliga konstruktionen innehar godtagbar dimensionering av kyl- respektive värmningsfunktion för tilltänkt applikation. För vidareutveckling av batterisystemets temperaturreglerande funktion återfinns ett flertal systemförbättrande åtgärder där prioriterade förbättringar utgörs av adaptiv kylning som endast aktiveras vid behov och kylning via battericellernas kontaktbleck. Implementering av förbättringsförslag resulterar i förlängd livslängd för battericellerna samt högre total verkningsgrad för batterisystemet.

<p>Advancements in future technologies such as artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and renewable energy create a consistent need for more powerful and smaller electronic devices and systems. As a result, thermal management components such as heat sinks need to remove higher heat loads from more compact spaces to keep electronics within their operational temperature limits. Constraints imposed by conventional manufacturing processes restrict the design of heat sinks to simple geometries with limited cooling performance. Recent widespread commercialization of metal additive manufacturing (AM) tools offers new potential for leveraging the design freedom of these manufacturing technologies to design and fabricate heat sinks with improved performance. </p> <p>In AM, three dimensional parts are created through layer-by-layer depositing of materials, which allows fabrication of complex geometries that would be impossible or too costly using conventional subtractive methods. Many novel heat sink geometries have been proposed in literature which incorporate features such as manifolds, flow mixers, and curved channels using engineering intuition to reduce pressure drop or enhance heat transfer. Although such designs have been shown to offer improved performance, mathematical design algorithms such as topology optimization (TO) have been shown to outperform engineering intuition. Topology optimization optimizes the material distribution within a given design space, guided by physics-based simulations, to achieve a user-defined objective such as minimization of thermal resistance. Previous TO approaches have used penalization methods to ensure the final designs are composed of macroscopic and non-porous features due to the past precedent of fabrication capabilities. This traditional penalization approach is well-suited to the constraints of conventional manufacturing methods; however, microstructures and porous features are easily fabricable with additive manufacturing. There is a need to develop TO approaches that are better suited for leveraging AM for the design of heat sinks. In this thesis, a homogenization approach to topology optimization is proposed wherein the material distribution is represented as parametrized microstructures. This formulation allows design of thermal management components that have sub-grid features and leverages AM for fabrication. The focus of this thesis is the development of the homogenization approach for TO of heat sinks, as well as the exploration of the design problems it can address, the performance benefits made available, and the two-phase flow physics that it uniquely allows to be incorporated into the topology optimization process.</p> <p>A topology optimization algorithm using the homogenization approach is developed by representing the material distribution as arrays of pin fins with varying gap sizes. To this end, the pin fins are modeled as a porous medium with volume-averaged effective properties. Height-averaged two-dimensional flow and non-equilibrium thermal models for porous media are developed for transport in the pin fin array. Through multi-objective optimization, TO designs are generated for an example case involving a hotspot over a uniform background heat input. The resulting topologies have porous-membrane-like designs where the liquid is transported through a fractal network of open, low-hydraulic-resistance manifold pathways and then forced across tightly spaced arrays of pin fins for effective heat transfer. The TO designs are revealed to offer significant performance improvements relative to the benchmark straight microchannel (SMC) heat sink with features optimized under the same multi-objective cost function. A series of microchannel heat sinks are fabricated using direct metal laser sintering to investigate the printing capabilities and to experimentally demonstrate the performance of topology optimized designs. Advantages of the homogenization approach over the penalization approach can be summarized as follows: (1) reduced computational costs due to its ability to create sub-resolution features, (2) intrinsically fabricable parts using available metal AM tools, and (3) easier to use due to significantly reduced number of hyperparameters (e.g., penalization factors) that are controlled by the user. </p> <p>Topology optimization has been applied to thermal management methods involving single-phase flows such as natural convection, forced air cooling, and pumped liquid cooling. Compared to these conventional heat sink technologies, flow boiling offers very high heat transfer coefficients and effective heat capacities, making it a promising candidate for future cooling electronics applications. The final goal of this thesis is to enable topology optimization of flow boiling heat sinks. However, TO of flow boiling heat sinks has been avoided due to difficulties in modeling the boiling phenomena; of note, there are no examples of TO being applied to the design of heat sink under flow boiling throughout the literature. Multi-dimensional two-phase flow models require prior knowledge of friction factor and heat transfer coefficients. Correlations are available in literature but are not universal and depend significantly on channel/fin geometries, surface roughness, and operating conditions. Given that traditional penalization-based TO approach results in fin and channel geometries with unknown shapes, dimensions, and alignment before the optimization is completed, this prohibits their use for optimization of flow boiling heat sinks. However, the homogenization approach to topology optimization developed in this thesis enables the optimization of flow boiling heat sinks. As it relies on user-defined microstructures with known shapes, alignments, and ranges of geometric dimensions, a universal correlation for flow boiling in microchannels is not needed. Instead, correlations for the user-defined microstructures are sufficient to simulate flow boiling in TO designs generated using the homogenization approach. To this end, a predefined microstructure geometry is chosen for which two-phase flow correlations exist and therefore topology optimization can be performed. Topology optimized heat sink designs under flow-boiling are generated and investigated at various heat inputs, topology optimization grid sizes, and maximum vapor quality constraints. Topology optimized heat sinks designed for single-phase versus two-phase flow are compared.  There are significant differences in hydraulic and thermal responses of the single-phase and two-phase designs due to high effective heat capacity rates and high heat transfer coefficients of flow boiling. The algorithm demonstrated in this work extends the capabilities of topology optimization to two-phase flow physics, and thereby enables the design of various two-phase flow components such as evaporators, condensers, heat sinks, and cold plates.</p> <p>The flow and heat transfer of the TO algorithm for microchannel heat sinks under flow boiling use a two-phase mixture model featuring an effective porous medium formulation. However, closure of the governing equations requires empirical correlations for pressure drop and heat transfer that are specific to the operating conditions, microstructure geometry, and surface finish. Therefore, it must be demonstrated these available correlations can be successfully calibrated over a range of microstructural variations present within the homogenization framework, so as to attain the required prediction generality and accuracy needed to ensure the resulting designs achieve Pareto-optimality. To this end, a set of uniform pin fin calibration samples are additively manufactured and experimentally tested under flow boiling at various flow rates and heat inputs for model calibration. All of the unknown/free coefficients in the adopted correlations are determined by minimizing the error between the model predictions and the experimental measurements using gradient-based optimization. The calibrated topology optimization algorithm is then used to generate a Pareto-optimal set of heat sinks optimized for minimum pressure drop and thermal resistance during flow boiling. Experimental characterization of these additively manufactured heat sinks, unseen during the model coefficient calibration process, reveals that the measured Pareto optimality curve matches that predicted by the topology optimization algorithm. Lastly, a heat sink design is generated for a design space involving multiple hot spots and background heating to showcase the capability of the experimentally calibrated two-phase topology optimization algorithm at handling complex boundary conditions. The optimized heat sink intelligently distributes an adequate amount of coolant flow to each of the heated regions to avoid local dry-out. This work demonstrates a complete framework for two-phase topology optimization of heat sinks through experimental calibration of flow boiling correlations to the porous medium used by the homogenization approach. </p> <p>The major contribution of this thesis is the development of a homogenization approach for TO of additively manufactured microchannel heat sinks under single- and two-phase flows. Not only does the homogenization approach provide several advantages over the traditional penalization approaches such as reduced computational costs, intrinsic fabricability using AM, and ease of use, but it also enables TO of heat sinks under flow boiling and potentially TO of other two-phase thermal management components. The work discussed in this thesis serves a comprehensive end-to-end guide on TO of microchannel heat sinks using the homogenization approach with experimental demonstrations for validation.</p>

Several novel techniques for controlling, managing and utilizing high power diode lasers are described. Low pressure water spray cooling for a high heat flux system is developed and proven to be an ideal cooling method for high power diode laser arrays. In order to enable better thermal and optical performance of diode laser arrays, a new and simple optical element, the beam control prism, is invented. It provides the ability to accomplish beam shaping and beam tilting at the same time. Several low thermal resistance diode packaging designs using beam control prisms are proposed, studied and produced. Two pump cavity designs using a diode laser array to uniformly pump rod shape gain media are also investigated.

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<p>Rising interest in high-performance servers in data centers to support the increasing demands for cloud-computing and storage have challenged thermal management systems. To prevent these increased power density servers from overheating due to the high heat fluxes dissipated, new cooling methods have continued to be investigated in recent years. One such solution is pumped two-phase cooling which shows promise over traditional air cooling due to the reduced power consumption it requires to operate, while also being able to dissipate large amounts of heat from the small components in servers.</p> <p>    </p> <p>Although pumped two-phase systems as a cooling strategy have existed for multiple decades, sub-optimal component design have hindered the potential efficiencies achievable. This is especially prevalent in the condenser where, in order to meet required metrics, these heat exchangers are commonly oversized due to maldistribution at low vapor qualities and a lack of understanding about the condensation behavior within certain geometries.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Through the work presented in this thesis, the capabilities of an air-cooled microchannel condenser model are explored for future use in optimization studies for data center applications. To perform this research, an investigation into the boundary conditions of these systems and common condenser modeling strategies were carried out. Using this knowledge, a flexible discretized condenser model was developed to capture the behavior of pumped two-phase cooling in data centers under a wide range of operating conditions. In conjunction, an experimental test setup was sized, designed, and constructed to provide validation for the model. Then, using the model, some initial parametric studies were conducted to identify the sensitivity effects of various parameters on overall condenser performance. In this initial study, some favored boundary conditions and geometries were found that both minimize refrigerant pressure drops and maximize heat transfer. For an air-cooled condenser operating with R1234ze(E), these include: refrigerant entering the condenser around 40% quality, operating at moderate refrigerant mass fluxes through the channels (130 - 460 kg/m^2-s), and designing microchannel condenser tubes with many tightly packed square ports. Continued investigation into the contributing parameters of weight in the future using the tools developed in this thesis will lead to further optimized condenser designs and operating conditions.</p>

This study addresses the critical need for effective thermal management in hypersonic vehicles facing intense heat at their leading edge due to high enthalpy flow. The objective is to propose an active impingement cooling system that ensures the structural stability and performance of these vehicles. This dissertation presents an in-depth exploration of the numerical simulations conducted on the hypersonic leading edge, focusing on a 3mm radius with active cooling utilizing supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) as the coolant. The research incorporates conjugate simulations that merge external hypersonic flow and sCO2 active cooling. Utilizing a thermodynamic non-equilibrium two-temperature model and various chemical models, including the 5-species Park's model and the 11-species Gupta's model, separate validations for the external hypersonic flow and internal sCO2 coolant flow were conducted. These validations facilitated combined simulations, underscoring the potential of maintaining metal temperatures within operational limits using sCO2 coolant. A comparative study of the 5- 5-species Park model and 11-species Gupta model demonstrated the former's effectiveness in predicting flow fields at Mach 7. Furthermore, this study shows the effect of varying the coolant tube-to-leading-edge distance (H/D), Thermal barrier coating thickness, and impingement angles, demonstrating improved heat transfer performance through these variations. A key aspect of this work is the exploration of converting hypersonic vehicle heat flux to power using the sCO2 cycle. The conceptual study, illustrated through the Mach 7 case, confirms the feasibility of harnessing power from aerodynamic heat flux, marking a significant progression in the field. This research contributes to the field by offering a detailed analysis of active impingement cooling for hypersonic leading edges, integrating real gas effects and multiple chemical models. The study adds novelty by investigating heat transfer enhancements through iv geometric variations and evaluating sCO2's potential as a coolant, addressing key facets of hypersonic vehicle thermal management.

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