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Investigation of a Novel Vapor Chamber for Efficient Heat Spreading and Removal for Power Electronics in Electric Vehicles

This work investigated a novel vapor chamber for efficient heat spreading and heat removal. A vapor chamber acting as a heat spreader enables for more uniform temperature distribution along the surface of the device being cooled. First, a vapor chamber was studied and compared with the traditional copper heat spreader. The thickness of vapor chamber was kept 1.35 mm which was considered to be ultra-thin vapor chamber. Then, a new geometrical model having graphite foam in vapor space was proposed where the graphite foam material was incorporated in vapor space as square cubes. The effects of incorporating graphite foam in vapor space were compared to the vapor chamber without the embedded graphite foam to investigate the heat transfer performance improvements of vapor chamber by the high thermal conductivity graphite foam. Finally, the effects of various vapor chamber thicknesses were studied through numerical simulations. It was found that thinner vapor chamber (1.35 mm thickness) had better heat transfer performance than thicker vapor chamber (5 mm thickness) because of the extreme high effective thermal conductivities of ultra-thin vapor chamber. Furthermore, the effect of graphite foam on thermal performance improvement was very minor for ultra-thin vapor chamber, but significant for thick vapor chamber. The GF could help reduce the junction temperature by 15-30% in the 5-mm thick vapor chamber. Use of GF embedded vapor chamber could achieve 250-400 Watt per Centimeter square local heat removal for power electronics. The application of this is not only limited to electronic devices but actuator and avionics cooling in aircrafts, thermal management of electronics in directed energy weapon systems, battery thermal management for electric and hybrid vehicles, smart phones cooling, thus covering a wide gamut of heat flux applications.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc984206
Date05 1900
CreatorsPatel, Anand Kishorbhai
ContributorsZhao, Weihuan, Choi, Tae-Youl, Li, Xiaohua
PublisherUniversity of North Texas
Source SetsUniversity of North Texas
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis or Dissertation
Formatxii, 76 pages, Text
RightsPublic, Patel, Anand Kishorbhai, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved.

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